Rafferty Colin

Execute the Office (eBook, ePUB)

Essays with Presidents

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

For better and worse the men sworn to uphold and execute the office of the President of the United States of America become the most powerful individuals in the free world. These men have steered the course of America through Revolution, fracture and reconciliation, to the moon, and into a role as a global superpower. But what, Colin Rafferty wants to know, do we know about these men, and how do we know it? Is an accumulation of facts enough to stand in for a life lived? Execute the Office explores the nature of identity and historical representation, progress, trial and error, cause, correlation, effect, and what gets preserved in the social conscience of American history, and what does not. While Execute the Office provides some facts, it also presents questions that have rarely been made on behalf of great men, questions that should be asked by each of us before we relegate a history, a fact, or a person into prescribed space. Who prescribes the spaces? Can we be more than our position, even if it is the highest position possible? What do we lose when we attain great power? When that power is transferred? In Execute the Office's forty-six genre-bending essays Rafferty asks us to look at the ironies that abound next to the beauty, the poetry, and the grave mistakes of these mens' lives. He asks us to not just consume, but to question the difficulties in articulating any human life . . . and then to look again. To look harder. What do you see? Why do you see it?

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Baobab Press
• Seitenzahl: 125
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Februar 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781936097333
• Artikelnr.: 59493998

Autorenporträt

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Colin Rafferty grew up on the Kansas side (which makes a difference). In third grade, he unhesitatingly told an autograph dealer that the label on a Lincoln autograph was wrong-he was the sixteenth president, not the seventeenth. Later, Rafferty attended land grant universities (Kansas State, Iowa State) and eventually got an MFA from the University of Alabama. He writes about monuments and memorials (Hallow This Ground, Break Away Books, published in 2016), presidents (Execute the Office), and more generally public and private histories. In doing research for Execute the Office, he visited the graves of 28 presidents, toured the homes of another 16, and, for reasons still unbeknownst to him, was allowed to handle a four-page letter written by George Washington. Rafferty has taught nonfiction writing at the University of Mary Washington since 2008, developing classes on nonfiction of place, the lyric essay, and writing for multimedia. Since 2012, he has lived in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their dog in the same neighborhood where Patrick Henry gave the "give me liberty or give me death" speech in the presence of two future presidents. He is surrounded by history.