Presents a biography of James Buchanan's niece who was the White House hostess during her uncle's presidency, helped create the National Gallery of Art, and started the first pediatrics hospital.
"When historian Alfred "Alf" Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974-77), he recalls not the political events of the time but rather a turbulent period of his own sexual past. Alf's highly idiosyncratic contribution to Retrospect consists not only of reams of unbuttoned personal history but also of pages from an unpublished project of the time, a chronicle of the presidency of James Buchanan (1857-61). The alternating texts mirror each other and tell a story in counterpoint, a frequently hilarious comedy of manners contrasting the erotic etiquette and social dictions of antebellum Washington with those of late-twentieth-century southern New Hampshire. Alf's style is Nabokovian. His obsessions are vintage Updike. " [from Amazon.com]
The story of president James Buchanan's lost love. He was engaged to be married to Ann Coleman in 1819. She broke off the engagement and told Buchanan she never wanted to see him again. Within a few months she died suddenly. Buchanan never married and kept her portrait in his bedroom until his death.
