Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Wow. How describe this book, let me see. Imagine if Dave Barry suddenly became about thirty IQ points smarter and gleefully devoted himself to concocting a past for the most boring president to ever live, and did so with great affection but without the slightest regard for what are tradionally known as "facts". "The Remarkable Millard Filmore" weaves a surprising amount of actual history with an equal amount of decided lunacy. Millard riding a unicorn on the cover is a tip-off.

We trace Millard's humble beginnings, his pirate ancestors (actually true), his unlikely rise in politics (some more truth) and his wild, previously unknown adventures (probably not true). Millard pops up in the strangest places (Florida, Africa, Japan!) hobbnobbng with the strangest people (The Pope! Queen Victoria! Edgar Allan Poe!) doing very odd things (Brace yourself: Millard Fillmore was really Zorro). Millard himself is not the rather nasty, weak character we read about in the school books, rather he is a beneign, bewildered character always the last to know what's going on (a riot, a massacre, the Civil War). I have to admit I kinda liked him.

Author George Pendle is blessed with a delightful wit, a spectactular vocabulary, a wonderful grasp of real hisory, and deep, deep insanity. (Plus if his picture on the back does him any justice, he's also pretty cute.) He has a positive genuis for writing in period language; everyone sounds and writes exactly as 1800's Americans would have sounded and written, had they all been demented. I dropped one star from the review only because the novel loses steam toward the end; the book could have been cut by 50 pages or so. I'm actually surprised Pendle sustains the joke for as long as he does. This book made me laugh, out loud and often, and then made me run to my sister's room to read her passages so we could laugh together. "Why would George Pendle," I asked her, "write an entire made-up biography of a dour dead guy?"
"Because he's like us," she replied.

I don't know if "The Remarkable Millard Fillmore" will reach a large audience, but we loved it, Mr. Pendle, and I think I can safely say if Millard were alive, he'd be confused. Mission accomplished.

GRADE: A-/B+

George Pendle has penned what is certainly the most entertaining book ever written about Millard Fillmore, one of history's forgotten leaders. The book actually is based on a shell of facts, but is embellished with a truly fevered imagination. It is generally fairly witty: some passages are simply sublime, while some are a bit trifling and fall a tad short of the mark.

Most of the criticism of the book is that it isn't a completely factually correct biography. Well here's a news flash: it isn't supposed to be. Didn't the cover art showing Fillmore riding a unicorn give people a clue? For those who complain that they don't know what is fact from fiction, perhaps reading the rather detailed notes on the subject at the end of the book would be a good idea; better yet, if you want a straight biography of Fillmore, feel free to buy one.

The book was written for an intelligent audience with a knowledge of history and the desire to read a satirized account of an obscure national leader forgotten by almost everyone other than academics. Fillmore is more interesting than is generally recognized, and this book, while clearly not unadulterated historical fact, will probably introduce far more readers to Fillmore than any conventional biography on the market.

On balance, the book isn't perfect, but was an enjoyable read and made me interested in learning more about the last Whig President in American history.

I consider myself an amateur historian, and was anxious to learn something about our thirteenth president, whom I knew little about. From this perspective reading this book was a failure. I felt like the last guy on the block to get the joke, as I didn't realize this was a spoof until I got about fifteen pages into the book.

But the author doesn't stop at miligning only Fillmore. He chooses a large array of targets, and the early 1800's are one of the funniest. He describes life in that time in such a way, that I often was laughing out loud.

The footnotes were often hilarious. In talking about the electoral college, he raposts "the fact that classes ...convene only once every four years has led to its reputation as a party school."

Or a hamlet-"To qualify as a hamlet a community had to have at least one unique superstition founded on either sneezing animals, the consumption of meat before sleeping, or the flight of sparrows on a windy day."

Or Fillmore himself-"It has largely been suggestedby presidential psychiatrists that Fillmore suffered from the verbal phenomenon known as 'cognitive ignorance'".

The author brings Fillmore to life in much the same way as a creation between the historical soldier Flashman and Forest Gump.

Opening Chapter 7, the author quotes Fillmore "Buffalo in the springtime, is as I imagine heaven to be, although with more precipitation and fewer cherubs."

This hilarious and often inane depiction of our 13th president kept me laughing. He intersperses his imagination of what the anti-hero is really like with the historical events of his times.

Interestingly enough, revisionist historians now take a much more moderate view of Fillmore. He is considered to be a temperate president who took a studied conciliation between the abolitionists and the pro-slavery factions, and averted an earlier civil war.

This book is often cruel to Fillmore, even maligning his wife's death, the day after he left office. While the events that Fillmore encountered are for most part factual, the author makes some bizarre interpretations. If they are read in good fun, it is worth the read.

It is worth a perusal, but read it when your mind is clear, so you can fully appreciate the bizarre humor of this author.

This is a fun book to read and it is well written. Make sure you realize that this book is NOT historically accurate. It is satire. There is some history, but it mainly plays on the fact that Millard is not well known and that there are many myths and legends about him.

This book is hilarious! The first page or two I was thinking this is going back up for sale on Amazon. Not now. I'll be re-reading this book. It is hilarious. It is hard to describe in just a small space, but from Fillmore's survival at the Alamo, duel with Andrew Jackson, thwarting an assassination attempt on Jackson, friendship with Edgar Allen Poe, his search for the source of the Nile. It is one amazingly funny episode after the next, all written in a straightforward style, not tongue in cheek. Even the index is funny.

As the author of the comic novel, "Millard Fillmore, Mon Amour," (in which my protagonist puts forth the theory that our 13th President may have been gay) I heartily applaud George Pendle's vivid, if mostly fabricated, appraisal of America's most forgotten president. His book is hilarious, and confirms what most historians already agree upon -- that the most noteworthy aspect of Fillmore's political career was its complete lack of noteworthiness. (Although, in terms of competence, I would gladly take Fillmore over George W. Bush any day) Perhaps between my novel and Pendle's amusing take on the subject, we can improve the general perception of Fillmore's political career from grossly pathetic to just flagrantly inept. If successful, this Herculean effort might just raise Fillmore's presidency to the lofty position in history now enjoyed by such celebrated statesmen as James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce and Chester A. Arthur.

George Pendle has managed literary alchemy turning a dull base president into gold. He writes so well that each sentence is a masterpiece of surrealist wordsmithery. One could be forgiven for being distracted or even dismissive of the footnotes, but they are as much part of the picture as the main text, and had me laughing out loud regularly. There are flavours of monty python ridiculousness, the flashman novels and the language skills of will self - i eagerly await this author's next offering.

As we learned with the author's poorly researched last book, he is not above making things up when it suits his theory or whim. Here, he makes the whole book up in a misguided effort to be amusing in an effete drawing room style. The truth is that the entire book would amount to a three minute Saturday Night Live sketch or maybe two pages in MAD magazine. I really don't know why you would bother with this book.

As a fan of both presidential trivia and political satire, I was looking forward to reading The Remarkable Millard Fillmore. Unfortunately, Pendle's book isn't very "remarkable" on either count.

This is a fictional biography of America's 13th president, augmented by the supposedly undiscovered private papers of Millard Fillmore (which have been scrawled in ballpoint pen in handwriting that is clearly not Fillmore's) and hidden away in the jungles of Uganda since 1873.

The humor is often forced and sophomoric and more times than not falls flat. The comic misuse of facts and mangling of vocabulary is reminiscent of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's works (The Compleat Works of Shakespeare Abrgd) but often the jokes, puns and situations just aren't that funny. Here's an example. Fillmore encounters General Andrew Jackson in a tavern. Unaware of Jackson's lightning temper, nor of his bitterness about being accused of bigamy because Jackson's wife Rachel had not completed her divorce from her first husband before marrying Jackson, Fillmore talks about the weather and innocently tells the General that though the fog off Lake Erie was bad today "there is a bigger mist rolling in to town tomorrow". Thinking that Fillmore has said "bigamist" and is referring to his wife, Jackson challenges Fillmore to a duel. Groan.

Pendle seems to be trying to channel the comic madness of Mel Brooks "HISTORY OF THE WORLD PART I", but succeeds only in emulating Brooks' later and decidedly unfunnier works, like LIFE STINKS. Though this book doesn't stink, it sure doesn't live up to its comic potential. However, if you are in the market for a much funnier political satire that lampoons the presidency, I suggest FIRST LADY by Patrick Dennis.

This book is neither fish nor fowl: neither a real biography (it should be catalogued, shelved and marketed as "Humor" and not as Biography) nor particularly funny satire. It's really more of a sophomoric mocking of biographers and historians who conduct actual research and write compelling stories of people's lives. It's just not funny, but rather silly in a way-too-full-of-himself way. Do not waste your money.