Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went off to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director (of the Sondheim musical Assassins), I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm – hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

This quote pretty much sums up the plot of Assassination Vacation (touring sites related to these three assassinations) and its tone (contempt). As a Canadian, I have no "skin in the game" when it comes to the current hyperpartisanship in the United States, but as a fairly conservative person (and by Canadian standards that's nowhere near Tea Party Republicans) the partisan attacks in this book read as churlish and unbalanced. More examples:

That's what I like to call him, "the current president." I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary.

Near here, on the far side of Cuba, more than six hundred prisoners of the War on Terror, a few of them child soldiers under the age of seventeen, are, by executive order, incarcerated at the U.S. base on Guantanamo Bay for who knows how long for who knows what reasons in what Human Rights Watch has called a "legal black hole".

By pulling the troops out of Dixie, the Republicans were selling out the freed slaves. Which makes the Compromise of 1877 one of the tourist attractions on the road to watching the party of Lincoln morph into the Republican Party we all know and love today.

As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about the votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in the years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they’ll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed at the EPA.

That last quote is fairly representative of Sarah Vowell's humour and I think that a reader will find her funny to the extent that one agrees with her politics. I do understand the political climate at the time of this book's writing (2006) and the hopelessness Vowell felt at having her country hijacked by what she found to be a distasteful agenda, but I'm sure it's the exact same way that Republicans feel right now under President Obama (who, by the way, hasn't quite found a way to close down Guantanamo Bay yet. And don't get me started on what an environmental hypocrite the Nobel Prize and Oscar winning Al Gore has turned out to be.)

When Vowell isn't venting her spleen and sticks to her stated purpose of visiting sites and monuments related to the three selected assassinations, travelling from Alaska to the Florida Keys, she provides interesting information and paints vivid pictures of the places she visits, with an especial fondness for the period-costumed tour guides in significant homes. The overall structure, however, is pretty random and scattershot, with a fairly comprehensive section on Lincoln and much less information on Garfield and McKinley. Personally, I found it very odd that Vowell didn't include the only other assassinated president; why write about three out of four? As the New York Times book review says: Having made the commercially courageous decision to avoid the catnip that is the Kennedy name, Vowell restricts her gaze to America's first three presidential murders: those of Abraham Lincoln, Garfield and William McKinley. Was this a courageous decision, would all things Kennedy overwhelm the stories of the other presidents, or did Vowell leave out the Democrat for partisan reasons? The fact that she doesn't explain the omission is passing strange to me, but as we are following Vowell as she determines what sites would interest her next, we must allow her to set the agenda. Not all the whistlestops were equally interesting to me, and like Vowell's sister, I often mentally "stayed in the car" as she explored. I was, however, interested in the information about Robert Todd Lincoln:

Abraham Lincoln's oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was in close proximity to all three murders like some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom. The young man who wept at his father's deathbed in 1865 was only a few feet away when James A. Garfield was shot in a train station in 1881. In 1901, Robert arrived in Buffalo mere moments after William McKinley fell. Robert Todd Lincoln's status as a presidential death magnet weighed on him. Late in life, when he was asked to attend some White House function, he grumbled, "If only they knew, they wouldn't want me there."

Also included was information about scandals and mismanagement Robert Todd Lincoln was involved in while he served out his own political career (unhidden spoiler/tease: cannibalism!), and Vowell even singles him out as a better target for the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, who shot McKinley. In the same vein, Edwin Booth (brother of John Wilkes) keeps making appearances: He once rescued Robert Todd Lincoln from the train tracks where he had fallen and at the moment pallbearers carried Booth's coffin from a church in New York City, the interior of the Ford Theater in Washington collapsed, killing 22 federal employees who were working in the converted office space. I liked these odd and fateful events even better than the well known coincidences that link the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations (an early exposure to these links, in LP form, started Vowell on her lifelong fascination with the subject of presidential assassination).

I liked this book less than Unfamiliar Fishes, but I didn't hate it, so I wouldn't say it warrants only two stars. It has, however, turned me off Sarah Vowell and I don't think I'll be reading her further. As a liberal-elite-atheist-memoirist, her humour and worldview isn't reaching me, and although I made the same complaint of hyperpartisanship about David Sedaris' latest book (Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls), his vignettes are redeemed by their overall atmosphere of gentleness and thoughtfulness. Assassination Vacation, to a reader like me who doesn't have a bone-deep hatred of George W. Bush and the Republican party, comes off as bitter and a little mean. I'll end with the same quote I shared from The Dinner that I linked with David Sedaris, David Rakoff, and Jon Stewart, intellectual compatriots of Sarah Vowell's who are losing their ability to amuse me, as it sums up the times for me:

The principal was probably against global warming and injustice in general. Perhaps he didn't eat the flesh of mammals and was anti-American or, in any case, anti-Bush: the latter stance gave people carte blanche not to think about anything anymore. Anyone who was against Bush had his heart in the right place and could behave like a boorish asshole toward anyone around him.

It's this assumption that a person is on the right, the smart, side of history when opposing an unloved administration that led to at least two of these three murders (Garfield's assassin was likely insane), and it's a position that I found Vowell to be too cosy with, weighing the whole book down for me.

Sarah Vowell is definitely one of the top five humans I’d love to grab a beer with then get so drunk I’d take the subway and end up in the Bronx or Rockaway Beach because I have a slight crush on her and love how she thinks. Her mind can jump from subject to subject quicker than the electric current in your lamp travels from the “on” switch to the light bulb. Very few people can make the seemingly spurious links in subject matter that she manages to connect together with each book in her own unique snarkalicious way. My lone caveat here is her attempt to tie together the then current events (this book was published in 2005 -> President Bush -> the Middle East) with the political climate surrounding the assassinations. It’s not that I disagree with her, it’s just that due to the untimeliness of her observations, she comes across as a bit shrill and the narrative has a tendency to drag at these points.

Since the bulk of this book is about President Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth, let’s approach this from a different perspective.



In a galaxy kind of far away, but close enough for dinner and drinks, President Lincoln appeals to the Starship Enterprise for help. “I’ll wrestle Colonel Green, the dude who led a genocidal war in the 21st century, if you help save me from John Wilkes Booth."



Kirk agrees, Lincoln throat punches Green and then Scotty transports Lincoln into an alternative dimension where he encounters the Scooby Gang.



Lincoln was all out of Scooby snacks and Scooby is good pals with the Super Friends so they shipped his Lincoln-log ass off to Superman.



Batman was all set to help, but Mrs. Lincoln was wearing pearls and this brought back a sense memory from his mom and dad getting gunned down and this make Bats cry.



Meanwhile on Earth 616, Captain America is attacked by a HYDRA-animated Hail Hydra!! Lincoln Memorial…



…but survives to uncover a Nazi plot to re-write history…



…so with the help of Reed Richards, he subs out Lincoln for a robot.



Lincoln-bot goes sentient…



…and encounters Deadpool, who’s crazier than Mary Todd Lincoln, and who uses Cable’s body slide tech to create a bizarre time-loop and undoes everything anyway.



The takeaway: Lincoln was really a Life Model Decoy and should never have had his likeness on the penny. Put Franklin Pierce on there instead! *waves to karen*

This was a buddy read with The Trish.

[audiobook]
[library]

This is the first time I've finished an audiobook and gone back to the beginning to listen to it again. I loved this book. It hits my historical true crime buttons; it's also well-written and thoughtful. Vowell is always studying her own project and its implications even as she's tracking down obscure sites with connections to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Also, I appreciate her sense of humor and the way she owns her own morbid geekery.

Vowell is the reader for the audiobook (with guest appearances by a wide and surprising variety of people), and once I got used to her voice and her timing, I became entirely on board with that choice. This is also the first time where the experience of listening to the audiobook has not been a second-best to reading the book on paper (although I am going to look for a paper copy as well).

Illuminating and quirky, Sarah Vowell takes us on a tour of the assassinated US presidents. She focuses largely on Lincoln, but touches on all three. There are some incredible coincidences and overlaps. This is my first of her books, but I like her offbeat humor, and will definitely read more.

The oxymoronic title of this book sums it up: it’s a travelogue of Sarah Vowell’s tours to all the important sites surrounding the assassinations of three out of four of America’s assassinated presidents, ie Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley. Lincoln gets the longest chapter because he’s the most famous and revered. Sarah gives him a beautiful tribute, particularly with her quote from Frederick Douglass’ eulogy. Reading about the other two presidents was a completely different experience because almost all the information was new to me. All three together make a continuous thread through American history. Like Lincoln’s assassination, Garfield’s also arose from post-Civil War conflict, and McKinley, himself a Civil War veteran, ushered in the new phase of north-south cooperation as the U.S. grew into a global power.

This is the second Sarah Vowell book I’ve ever read, and I liked it even more than the last one (The Wordy Shipmates, which is about the Puritans.) It’s got more history, more snarky laughs, and a lot less vitriol. (As an ex-Christian and part Native American, Sarah Vowell has more of an axe to grind against the Puritans.) The one flaw is a few immodest parts; Garfield’s assassin had been a member in a free love colony for five years. If not for that, I’d be pushing the book on my son. It’s a fun way to learn some good solid history.

An entertaining travel memoir about the author visiting sites associated with presidential assassinations. I read this on audio, which Vowell narrates herself. She doesn't have a conventional audiobook narrator voice, but I think it worked for her quirky writing style. I love when people have obscure obsessions, and a few times I started to wonder "Am I turning into Sarah Vowell??" but then she would mention her many phobias or her preference for city living (nope, I am not). I kind of feel like visiting some obscure historic sites now myself....

The truly ugly side of liberal "progressives". I just felt a lot of bitter hate from this book.

Ugh! Sarah Vowell, you annoy the hell out of me, on This American Life and in this book. I always think, "that would be totally funny if that happened to me" but her writing is never sufficient enough to translate it to the page. She's just not a good storyteller--she wants to be David Sedaris but she can't seem to pull it off.

I also can't stand when people go on about how so-called nerdy they are when you know they secretly relish being weird and quirky.

I have a friend that confuses her with Starley Kine on This American Life because they both have funny voices but Starley Kine is a wonderful and moving storyteller.

I love the idea of fun, readable history--this was clunky, self-indulgent and boring.

Safe to say, few people know more about U.S. history than Sarah Vowell.

Vowell's voice (both spoken and written) is widely famous, more so than her name. You've heard her channel a precocious superhero in "The Incredibles" (she's Violet Parr), you've heard her best public radio intonation on "This American Life," you've read her work on McSweeney's outstanding website and in the New York Times' opinion pages. She's the author of several books on American history, including one I read toward the end of 2017 about the bromance between the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington during Revolutionary War times ("Lafayette in the Somewhat United States").

You don't have to be gifted to bank a considerable amount of historical knowledge. However, the ability to weave compelling, relevant and humorous narratives out of historical factoids? That is, indeed, a gift -- and one possessed by a very select group. Vowell stands tall within this small coterie as someone who can knit her impressive historical knowledge into a compelling narrative and do so in a memoirish way that is personal, but not self-serving.

With this compliment as a backdrop, you should not be surprised to learn that Ms. Vowell's idea of a good time is tracing the literal footsteps of John Wilkes Booth, Booth's "alleged" accomplice Samuel Mudd, Charles Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz -- presidential assassins responsible for the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield and William McKinley, respectively. The result of her macabre pilgrimage? "Assassination Vacation."

Along this journey, which takes her from Alaska, to Montreal to the Dry Tortugas, we learn a wealth of information about these four men, the three presidents they murdered, the memorials we have erected in their memory, and how what goes around comes around (historically speaking).

For me, personally -- one of those ungifted people who knows a fair amount of American history but lacks the talent to weave the various, disparate threads together into delightful tapestries -- I'm a little amazed and somewhat embarrassed about how much I learned while reading Vowell's book. For instance...

For years I had assumed that Garfield was shot at Washington's Union Station (which still serves as the city's main train depot) -- but this is false. He was in actuality gunned down at the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Station, which is no longer standing.

A chunk of brain matter belonging to Charles Guiteau has been and still is on display at Philadelphia's treasured museum of medical oddities -- the Mutter. I've been to the Mutter (and have seen Grover Cleveland's secret jaw tumor on display) but somehow missed Guiteau's brain. Apparently, I also overlooked the nubbin of preserved flesh cut from John Wilkes Booth's body. Knowing now what I didn't know then, I'd have gladly traded the time I spent with the Mega Colon for five good minutes ogling the flesh of not one, but two presidential assassins.

Speaking of Charles Guiteau -- arguably the most fascinating American psychopath you've never heard of -- during the Civil War, he lived among the famed group of fornicators known as the Oneida Community. Before they started making mid-priced flatware -- no lie, the very same Oneida -- the oversexed followers of Reverend John Noyes created a quasi-Christian commune that lived in the belief that Christ had long ago returned to- and redeemed- the Earth. Therefore, the time of judgment had passed and this was, right now, heaven on Earth. As a consequence of sin being eradicated, everyone would (finally) get to have as much sex as they wanted with as many commune members as they wanted -- as long as none of the men achieved orgasm. (This is all literally a part of American history and, therefore, anyone who claims that history is boring is full of shit.)

It was under this sexy pretense that Guiteau -- who looks a bit like a hybrid of William Sherman's face and hair, U.S. Grant's beard and Gilbert Godfried's body -- was apparently the only member of the community who couldn't get laid. For five years. That's how off-putting and generally loathsome Charles Guiteau was. It was this latent sexual frustration, not to mention his inability to secure a cushy ambassadorial assignment to France, that led Guiteau to stalk James Garfield into that now-demolished train station and fire a bullet point-blank into his midsection.

I knew nothing of Guiteau's romantic disappointments before reading Vowell's book.

What else is noteworthy?

The day after Lincoln was nominated for the Republican ticket in 1860, artist Leonard Volk made a cast of his hands. His right hand is swollen as compared to his left, for the simple reason that he was sore from shaking countless hands the day before. Anyway, replicas of that cast became a common collector's item in the years after his election and, especially, after his assassination. One set made its way to the home of a wealthy New Yorker where, during a house party, they were picked up and admired by an visiting actor. When someone told the gentleman whose hands they were, he paused silently and then placed them reverantly back on their shelf. The actor's name? Edwin Booth -- brother of John Wilkes.

James A. Garfield -- who listed reading as his primary hobby -- read in a specially-constructed, lop-sided chair, which allowed him to sit sideways with his legs dangling over the chair's arm, "slouched in a posture with all the decorum of a teenager plopped on top a beanbag."

There are innumerable anecdotes like these throughout the book -- catnip for anyone with even the slightest interest in American history. But more than just warmed-over tidbits from these long-ago tragedies, Vowell does an admirable job tying the circumstances within which these events took place to the modern day.

For instance, she references the oft-quoted, marginally creepy and much-overwrought comparison between the assassinations of Lincoln and John F. Kennedy (both had vice presidents named Johnson, one was elected in 1860 and the other in 1960, etc.).

There's also the fact that Vowell wrote this book in the early 2000s, a time when George W. Bush was trying (and failing) to establish a rationale for the invasion of Iraq. The logic he settled on -- a hybrid of revenge (the 9/11 attacks -- which didn't originate in Iraq) and freedom-fighting on behalf of Iraqi civilians, was not dissimilar to William McKinley's rationale for the Spanish/American War of 1898 (revenge for the sinking of the Maine -- which was likely an accident -- and freedom-fighting on behalf of Filipinos). In fact, Karl Rove (W's campaign architect and proud(?) owner of the sobriquet "Bush's brain") has since written an fawning biography of McKinley and has long claimed that Mark Hanna ("McKinley's brain" and the architect of the Ohioan's 1896 campaign) was his muse in 2000 and 2004.

By deftly linking the past with the present, Vowell reminds us that history is not dusty and dead. It's more than obscure road-side plaques and period recreations. Rather, history is alive and in perpetual motion, growing and stretching backward a little further each day. And, more often than not, what we learn from the past will aid us as we interpret the present and attempt to predict the future.

Funny + learning = awesome.

Let's put it this way. I read most of this book during weekday work breaks, so it had to be light and airy enough to make it feel like my brain was resting. On the other hand, Vowell spends a lot of time writing about the likes of politics in the days of Presidents Garfield and Arthur, which is only riveting to the geekiest of the geeks. ("Just for fun, I decided to take a self-guided tour of Garfield's Washington D.C. ...") So I think I pay it high compliment in saying that it works. Bottom line is that Sarah is funny and quirky and bright and sensible and it all just makes me wish I could vacation with her.

What really makes the book fly is its balance. Sure, she writes about the assassination of presidents. But she is also writing about architecture and historical and cultural memory (the importance of relics and sacred icons connecting us to our past). There are the various levels of the historical events themselves, the resulting monuments, and her (and the public's) reaction to it. And she's writing about the odd people she runs into and how people react to reading old bronze plaques. And how one edits justifications for violence down to a length suitable for tee shirts. And her three year-old nephew obsessed with "skeletons" and "crypts". And it's fun, because she makes the history interesting and puts in humor wherever appropriate.

I'm sorry I'm finished.

3.5 stars
Very quirky and entertaining...history lesson? travelogue? political statement?

Very nice stories about Vowell's travels to see the plaques and monuments surrounding a few Presidential assassinations. The tangents are just as interesting (maybe some of them more interesting) as the main points. If you've ever watched a well-done documentary and thought to yourself that if your history teacher were like that show host you might have enjoyed class more -- Vowell is a host like that.

Sarah Vowell, will you marry me?

I liked The Partly Cloud Patriot, but I loved Assassination Vacation. Vowell's pilgrimage to sites associated with the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley struck so many cords with me it is hard to know where to begin. First, I learned a ton. I knew a lot of what she mentioned about the Lincoln assassination (though by no means all of it), but really, does anybody know much about Garfield or McKinley? I knew McKinley's assassin was somehow associated with Emma Goldman, but that was about it. So the book is worth reading (or, in my case, listening to, because Vowell's story-telling style lends itself so well to audio book) just for the information it contains.

But it's so much more than that. It's also funny, and it's funny in a dorky way that I just adore. Vowell's ability to embrace her inner civics geek is commendable, especially for someone who was once a rock journalist. The fact that she is giddily interested in presidential assassinations and all manner of morbid and grotesque history is impressive, but what is more impressive is that she relishes this interest and is unapologetic about it. The story she tells connecting her Oneida tea pot to the Oneida cult/"intentional community" in upstate New York and then to Garfield's assassin is not only fascinating, it also seriously makes me want to marry her. Or at least be her best friend forever. I mean, who wouldn't love someone who could come out with that while pouring you a cup of tea?

It's not Vowell's relentless and uber-cute dorkiness that gets me the most, though, it's her honest devotion to and nearly spiritual belief in U.S. history, government, and myth. More than anything, the book made me want to take a trip to Washington D.C., to see if I'm as mesmerized by the Lincoln monument as Vowell is, to move through the Smithsonian at a snail's pace like I'm sure she does. As someone with a degree in American history and a lifelong interest in it's minutiae, I'm hardly a tough audience, but Vowell got me more excited about it than I have been in years, and excited about a whole different aspect of it (i.e. presidential history, which I've never cared for at all). Like Utah Phillips, her words convince you that the past is important, that it means something, and that it ought to be considered, honored, respected, and made fun of. I'm into that.