Books: Love, Valour, Compassion

Florence Harding was an ambitious and savvy political wife who stood by her man. Hmmm...

By the 199th page of Florence Harding (William Morrow; 645 pages; $30), Carl Sferrazza Anthony's comprehensively documented biography of America's 29th First Lady, her husband Warren, now running for President, has already fallen into a reckless affair with Mrs. Harding's friend Carrie Phillips, trysted with a female Senate aide, ogled nude, frolicking teenage girls on a farm in Ohio, and sired two illegitimate children--one of them conceived in his Senate office with a woman 32 years his junior. It is with some amusement, then, that the reader at this point in the book finds a chapter titled "Women." Perhaps Anthony ran...

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