The Taylor File

About the Book

THE TAYLOR FILE: The Mysterious Death of a President chronicles the forensic investigation that led to the 1991 exhumation of the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor. His short administration (from the inauguration in 1849 until his death in July, 1850), may just have been the most critical in our history, for it grappled with the evils of slavery at a time when the whole country was caught in the exhilaration of winning the West from Mexico in a war that was, ironically enough, largely won by the heroic determination of this slave-owning old frontier soldier who refused to join a political party, make a speech or attend a convention. Could he have prevented the Civil War? We will never know.

About the Author

Mother of four, grandmother of six, Army wife, ex-professor of humanities, Clara Rising, Ph.D., sold in 1986 without an agent to the first publisher to see it a long manuscript which became the Civil War novel IN THE SEASON OF THE WILD ROSE. Since then four more books, ranging from ancient Greece to the exhumation of President Zachary Taylor, have confirmed her belief that only through the insights of inspiration can the facts of history rescue us from a despair which too often accompanies reality. In the poems of THAT INWARD EYE Rising reaffirms her no-nonsense commitment to a cultural inheritance she considers essential for survival in the 21st century. A large part of that inheritance is an unabashed passion for Nature and for animals--perhaps our ultimate salvation in an increasingly crazy world. Now 81 and a great-grandmother, she lives and rides her horse in the countryside near Lexington, Kentucky.