Useless Penguins

I raved a few days ago about Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. Don't buy it. It's brilliant, revelatory even, but when you get to page 460 of the Penguin edition, you get a terrific sense of déjà vu. Instead of the run-up to the Emancipation proclamation, we get pages 413-460 all over again. After that, it's essentially 'once out of the escape-proof hole'. Aaaagggghhhhh

Yet more books

I'm feeling seriously rough today - swimming didn't help - and I've got a big pile of marking to do. Or rather, I should have, but 18 essays are mysteriously missing in the bureaucracy. Brilliant.

I got another book in the post today - Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian Romances. Unfortunately, I discover that it's a rather archaic 1914 translation and that I already have this copy. The up side is that the new copy is a rather pretty hardback. I'm also reading Team of Rivals by Doris Stearns Goodwin, who got into trouble for plagiarism in her The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds a few years back. The new book is astonishing - tracing the parallel careers of Lincoln and the rivals he integrated into his cabinet. It's astonishing partly because Lincoln's rivals (Chase, Bates, Salmon) were brilliant, committed, serious - how times change - and because Lincoln's elevation from desperate squalor to President was aided by luck so many times. According to my copy, Obama used it as a template for his cabinet.