American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles
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Hero, adulterer, bon vivant, murderer and rogue, Dan Sickles led the kind of existence that was indeed stranger than fiction. Throughout his life he exhibited the kind of exuberant charm and lack of scruple that wins friends, seduces women, and gets people killed. Book Magazine The lurid life of Dan Sickles—a notorious nineteenth-century libertine who murdered his wife's lover and somehow got away with it—could have inspired a compelling historical novel. But Keneally, author of the Booker Prize-winning Schindler's List, presents Sickles' story in a tone so stuffy that it fails to capitalize on the material. A flamboyant footnote to American history, Sickles was a New York congressman who flaunted his affairs with prostitutes, was a protégé of President James Buchanan and a confidante of Abraham Lincoln (whose wife he was rumored to have seduced), and became a controversial Civil War general. Society permitted Sickles to indulge what Keneally terms his "disordered hungers," yet wouldn't forgive his young wife, Teresa, for her affair with Philip Barton Key (son of Francis Scott). "Younger male visitors became moonstruck over her superior gifts of body and temperament," writes Keneally, who himself seems to moon over the ill-fated wife. Keneally fails to get under the skin of either his subject or any of the book's other crucial figures. He makes adultery and murder seem surprisingly dull. —Don McLeese
