Sarah Vowell's fascination with three assassinated presidents -- Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley -- leads to this delightful, thought-provoking book (Assassination Vacation) daring us to compare the crap in our times to the crap that has gone on before. Clearly, no one has learned from history, not even the historians.
This book has long been on my want-to-read list. And, as usual, found it at the local thrift store. I'm terrible for wanting to read books but buying them in ways that don't support the author.
Though at time her snipes at the second Bush administration were distractions, they were for the most part apt and led to some thinking, particularly about leaping into war just, you know, because. Or on false pretenses and such. Vowell has a nose for sniffing out hypocrisy no matter where it lies, and delights in pointing it out. We ought to be willing to read and acknowledge the same, even if we find the hypocrisy within.
Vowell takes us through some tumultuous times, from the assiassination of Lincoln near the end of the Civil War to the assassination of McKinley on the tail-end of the Spanish-American War. Wars that did a lot, but didn't do enough, and led to a lot of people dying and problems that we're still grappling with today as wheels and deals spun behind closed doors, sometimes as the presidents lay bleeding.
It also reminded me of this (Lincoln excluded):
No comments:
Post a Comment