I have a huge crush on Sarah Vowell, just sayin'. She's funny, she's eloquent, she's fascinating, etc. Oh and she played Violet in The Incredibles as I have a huge crush on Sarah Vowell, just sayin'. She's funny, she's eloquent, she's fascinating, etc. Oh and she played Violet in The Incredibles as well as doing amazing radio essays for This American Life.
I'm a fan of her PRI essays but not so much of her books, I was very happily surprised to find I liked Assassination Vacation much more than her others. It's an investigation of the tourism around the sites of presidential assassinations and odd facts and trivia surrounding them and their assassins. She intersperses the book with anecdotes of her adventures she had on her self-proclaimed pilgrimage of presidential assassination. Quick tip: If you find a way to time-travel to the late 19th or early 20th Centuries, never let Robert Todd Lincoln attend your party... dude ... seriously, never!!
I have a few nits to pick with some of her information, especially with Pres. Garfield, but she mostly gets the history right, so that's cool. It's hard not to grin at her infectious and obvious love of history as well as her idiosyncratic asides such as wishing she could go back in time and kill her relative who rode with Quantrails' Raiders; or how cute she finds John Wilkes Booth; or how the Maryland State song (adopted in 1939) contains references critical of Lincoln, The Union and favorable to the Confederacy.
I also found she shares a passion of mine, historical plaques and signs. If I see one, even on a bridge, I have to stop read and take a picture. As you'll find out if you read Assassination Vacation, they are impossibly and improbably compelling. Really!
This is not great literature or great history but it is fun and interesting. I enjoyed her dry-humored, pop-informational tour of our more necrotic presidents and the assassins who hated them. If your a Sarah Vowell or history fan, I don't think you'll be disappointed.
PS: Get the Audio book if you can, it features the voices of - Conan O’Brien, Seth Green, Stephen Colbert, David Cross, Paul Begala, Michael Chabon, Norman Lear, and music by They Might Be Giants. Conan is hilarious as the voice of Sad-sack son of Lincoln, Robert Todd....more
I read this book in 2005 as a library book after I saw it won the Edgar Award for best Best Fact Crime the year before. I own a copy, I re-read it lasI read this book in 2005 as a library book after I saw it won the Edgar Award for best Best Fact Crime the year before. I own a copy, I re-read it last year.
My fascination with the World's Columbian Exhibition (1893 Chicago World's Fair) began when I went to work for the President Benjamin Harrison Home. Harrison, as President, commissioned the Fair. A formality really. The Fair began as a 400th Anniversary Celebration of Columbus landing in the Americas. It soon grew beyond that. Harrison attended it after leaving office and apparently enjoyed himself. At least until his cousin and popular Chicago Mayor, Carter Harrison, Sr. was assassinated two days before the fair's closing. There are many great sites online where you can look at photos and find information about the Fair. I'd encourage you to put 'World's Columbian Exposition' and or '1893 Chicago World's Fair' in your search engines and be amazed by The White City.
Larson's book tells the true story of two men: Daniel Burnham, the visionary architect who designed the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and inadvertently created the perfect conditions for one of America's first serial killers, Herman Webster Mudgett aka Dr. H. H. Holmes. The killer used the fair to lure young women to his hotel to meet their bloody ends down in his secret vaults.
Larson does a masterful job of weaving their stories together. In his hands, Burnham's fight to build his fair is just as gripping as Mudgett's murders, and somehow these two very different tales become one. Triumph and tragedy, a vanished time and a lost kingdom, a terrific read....more