The Republic and the Laws or The Remarkable Millard Fillmore

The Republic and the Laws

Author: Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero's The Republic is an impassioned plea for responsible government written just before the civil war that ended the Roman Republic in a dialogue following Plato. This is the first complete English translation of both works for over sixty years and features a lucid introduction, a table of dates, notes on the Roman constitution, and an index of names.

Read also The Return of the Primitive or Walking with the Wind

The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President

Author: George Pendl

Millard Fillmore has been mocked, maligned, or, most cruelly of all, ignored by generations of historians--but no more! This unbelievable new biography finally rescues the unlucky thirteenth U.S. president from the dustbin of history and shows why a man known as a blundering, arrogant, shallow, miserable failure was really our greatest leader.
In the first fully researched portrait of Fillmore ever written, the reader can finally come face-to-face with a misunderstood genius. By meticulously extrapolating outrageous conclusions from the most banal and inconclusive of facts, The Remarkable Millard Fillmore reveals the adventures of an unjustly forgotten president. He fought at the Battle of the Alamo! He shepherded slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad! He discovered gold in California! He wrestled with the emperor of Japan! It is a list of achievements that puts those of Washington and Lincoln completely in the shade.
Refusing to be held back by established history or recorded fact, here George Pendle paints an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary man and restores the sparkle to an unfairly tarnished reputation.

Publishers Weekly

America's 13th president has often been the subject of humor, and this bogus biography by Pendle (Strange Angels: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons) is no exception. Fillmore was not a "blundering, pompous, ultimately shallow failure," claims Pendle. Instead, we learn that the multitalented Fillmore had a rich and varied life, at once heroic, artistic and full of intellectual vigor. He saved a woman from a shark attack and received good reviews for his minstrel show performance: "he had the audience guffawing mightily." A prolific inventor, he never received proper credit for vulcanizing rubber or designing the cooling "Tea-shirt." Like Woody Allen's Zelig, Fillmore had a knack for always being present at major historical events, where he usually emerged triumphant (as when he prevented the assassination of Andrew Jackson and survived the Battle of the Alamo. Using previously unknown sources, Pendle has achieved his goal "to redeem the reputation of a forgotten giant," and he also succeeds in amusing readers by mixing the historical and the hysterical. 40 b&w illus. (Apr.)

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Kirkus Reviews

According to this less-than-authoritative history, there was once an American president named Millard Fillmore. Who knew such a clueless, forgettable chief executive could have had such epic adventures?If we remember anything at all about Millard Fillmore, it is that he is credited with the invention of the rubber band. So asserts Pendle, an inventive biographer in the grand slapstick tradition of Bill Nye, Elbert Hubbard and other forgotten wits. As he tells it, Fillmore's life was quite remarkable indeed, and very much the archetype for that of an equally powerful intellectual force, the extraordinary Forrest Gump. Based on the recently unearthed first 53 volumes of Fillmore's journals, the present book fills more pages of Millardian history than any other text properly could. It traces the ascent of the United States' largely ignored 13th president from back-country primitive and congressional yokel to White House rube and beyond. Throughout, whether under the Whig banner or that of the Know-Nothings, Fillmore never wavered in pursuit of the ephemeral Masonic menace. It's an addled story, well suited to today's needs, as we follow the accidental president's encounters with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel F.B. Morse and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From New York to the Alamo, from California to Egypt, feckless Fillmore took part in all the signal events of the 19th century, we discover in this landmark salute to anti-factual historiography. Like a real history, the text is adorned with footnotes of significant dubiety. Appended, though, is a guide to actual factoids upon which the silliness is constructed. Happily, it's all consistently funny, although like any strong purgative, the comedymight best be taken in small doses. We await Pendle's next-perhaps a biography of Thurlow Weed, the forgotten Whig wag. Droll, almost instructive and quite entertaining.