Description

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921. Hardcover, 275 pp. First Edition. Acceptable / NO dust jacket. Blue cloth covered boards have some nicking and fraying to the cloth along the top and bottom of spine and corner tips. Moderate overall scuffing and soiling to covers as well. Binding tight. Pages moderately aged but otherwise unmarked. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Missing jacket. Edward G. Lowry (1876 - 1943) was a journalist who for many years was the Washington correspondent for the New York Evening Post. In Washington Close-Ups, Lowry gives a dozen or so character sketches about the movers and shakers of that time, including Herbert Hoover, William Jennings Bryan, Hiram W. Johnson, and William Howard Taft. [From book review in The Pacific Review Vol. II, 1922] A series of portraits of our Senators and Representatives and Cabinet Members, who are "individually, always so awe-inspiring to their fellow countrymen, while collectively it has always been the fashion to disparage them." Mr. Lowry's characterizations of Mr. Harding, "the great emollient," of Mr. Coolidge, "silent upon a peak in Darien," of Mr. Bryan who in office "is a caged bird and can't sing," but who out of office is still peerless and "a troubadour," of Mr. Johnson the fighter, "a bold forthright, questing man," about whom there is only one anecdote in existence, of Major-General Wood whose candidacy for the presidency was "an open process openly arrived at". - all these and many others are presented in a style that has abundant kick in it but that somehow kicks with a padded hoof. It is Mr. Lowry's humor, doubtless, that enables him thus to dismember his public men in their public personalities while leaving them privately unassaulted, without internal injuries, and possibly not unwilling to shake his hand when next they meet him. This book is too entertaining to be missed by those who seek entertainment, and true enough to be worth the reading of those who don't.