Showing results by author "Thomas Mallon" in All Categories

In a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic, is eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim's first job and, after Fuller's advances, his first love affair.

For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated - uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs - it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal’s greatest mysteries - who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape? - and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew.

On the evening of Good Friday, 1865, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris joined the Lincolns in the presidential box at Ford’s Theater, becoming eyewitnesses to one of the great tragedies of American history. In this riveting novel, Thomas Mallon re-creates the unusual love story of this young engaged couple whose fateful encounter with history profoundly affects the remainder of their lives.

Dick Kallman was an up-and-coming actor in the fifties and sixties—until he wasn’t. A costar on Broadway, a member of Lucille Ball’s historic Desilu workshop, and finally a primetime TV actor, Dick had hustled to get his big break. But just as soon as his star began to rise, his roles began to dry up and he faded from the spotlight, his name out of tabloids and newspapers until his sensational murder in 1980.

A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions - not the other way around. With characteristic élan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary as a spurious, despotic, and megalomaniacal operative.

When the brilliant Cynthia May—a Civil War widow whose beauty has been shadowed by worry and poverty—starts work as a human “computer” at the Observatory, astronomer Hugh Allison has found just the partner he needs for a radiant, half-crazed scheme that will make him live forever in the annals of science and space. But first the two scientists must overcome the very earthly obstacles presented by powerful Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York and a fraudulent astrologer who just might know their future.

Set during the tumultuous middle of the George W. Bush years - amid the twin catastrophes of the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina - Landfall brings Thomas Mallon's cavalcade of contemporary American politics, which began with Watergate and continue with Finale, to a vivid and emotional climax.

From the author of the acclaimed novel Watergate comes a galvanizing new novel about the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president of modern times - Ronald Reagan. Finale takes listeners to the political gridiron of Washington in 1986, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev.

"A religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer, and an accomplice of worldly secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anybody to believe her. It is past time that she was duly honored and taken at her word." Among his many books, perhaps none have sparked more outrage than The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens's meticulous study of the life and deeds of Mother Teresa.

Novelist and essayist Mallon talks with Freeman, critic and American editor of Granta, about the great, lost art of letter writing and the current frenzy of electronic messaging. A discussion with the audience ensues.