READ REVIEWS AND ARTICLES
“…an engaging memoir… brave, highly personal…. A love story in a political context: the great events in New York’s life in the last 40 years, observed by a sharp reporter from a privileged perch.
…on their first date in 1976, a party at the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s townhouse, which she recalls as a nightmare that might have been conjured up by Tom Wolfe. “A ghastly fairyland of flowing chiffons, feathery boas coiling around swan-thin necks. . . . Living lollipops.” Jackie O. makes an appearance. “The sophisticated mouths of the society ladies fell open and smiled dumbly at her.”
Taking Lucinda home after that party and dinner together, Morgenthau demonstrates he was as adept at seduction as at prosecution. She opened her apartment door “just a crack,” she writes, “put my heavy shoulder bag between us, shook his hand with firm finality, slipped in and closed the door. Somehow, he had slipped in behind me.” The D.A. proves to be a great lover. “For all their revolutionary pronouncement, boys my age . . . swooped down on women like raptors. . . . But not this man.” And best of all, he made pancakes the morning after.
I loved her unabashed affirmation of love’s irrational power. Lucky man, to have found such a smart, devoted and utterly loyal partner…By writing this affecting book…Lucinda Franks has made their love story permanent.”
—The New York Times Book Review of Timeless (Read the full review)
The New York Times, “An Original Power Couple.” Read the article
“[An] earnest and candid memoir… Timeless spans …from the 1970s to the 2000s — and personalizes some defining moments in both the country’s and the couple’s history: juicy tidbits from high-profile New York court cases; memories of Reagan running against Carter in 1980; Franks’ interview with Hillary Clinton in 1999; the 2001 World Trade Center attacks; even Morgenthau’s final winning campaign for district attorney, “90 in ’09.”
—The Denver Post (Read the full review)
“This fascinating personal and political history has a great love story at its heart.”
—MORE Magazine
“This memoir reveals another side of him (Morgenthau). “The husband I know has the sweet cadence of an oboe, and the husband I don’t speaks with an Old Testament fury.” She describes him as a passionate lover who makes pancakes for breakfast the morning after and who proudly carried their first baby, Joshua, around in a blue sling, taking him along to parties and even, to the horror of one host, giving him sips of beer.
Near the beginning of their relationship, she takes Mr. Morgenthau, the epitome of patrician dignity, to a Greenwich Village coffeehouse where they heard a man with a lisp and a voice like Tiny Tim’s read Allen Ginsberg’s long obscenity-filled poem “Howl.” It’s a scene that’s impossible not to relish. Her radical friends, she says, were a far cry from those of Mr. Morgenthau’s Park Avenue social set, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Bob even agreed to visit them and sat eating tofu on a water bed, but when he came out of the bathroom, having had to wipe his hands on towels made of American flags, he looked dour”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The book chronicles not only a marriage but an era.”
—Boston Globe
“Timeless has something for everyone—sections custom-made for lawyers, for historians, lovers, psychologists and more . . . We are blessed to have this full accounting of Franks’ [marriage].”
—The Buffalo News (Read the full review)
“…wondrously moving work. . . . Franks writes passionately of this ‘love of two eccentrics’ . . . in her rather miraculous story of a transcendent love that is imperiled only the specter of mortality.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Franks’ chiseled prose demonstrates her chops as a veteran journalist… The boldface names give the book curb appeal, but this memoir’s hidden strength is its testimony to the beauty and difficulty of a long-term marriage.”
—Kirkus Review
“A tender portrait of devotion. . .This is an intimate and revealing look at a high-profile couple, nurturing and supporting each other in a swirl of New York politics, media, marriage, and family.”
—Booklist
“Timeless is like an extended conversation, hard to end and frequently providing insightful paragraphs and lovely sentences and turns of phrase…”
“It’s hardly surprising for a wife to speak adoringly of an accomplished husband, if seldom also so candidly. But are 376 text pages an enormous self-indulgence? Yes, and I enjoyed every bit.”
—Neal Gendler, Washington Jewish Week
Book review: Age doesn’t matter when hearts in sync
“Timeless: Love, Morgenthau and Me” is a documentary novel that publicly rewinds the nearly four decades of marriage…”
“Franks tells their love story with the precision of an observant journalist.”
—CNHI News Service
“It’s an honest, candid, almost-tell-all of her 36-year marriage to longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — a man nearly 30 years her senior — an unlikely alliance between a decorated journalist and self-described radical and a famous attorney who operated within a circle of political movers and shakers.”
—The Desert Sun (Read the full review)