I loved this book. Having borrowed it from the library, I'm almost certainly going to buy an ebook edition so I can dip into it from time to time. Having said that, though, I've got to add that it's quirky enough that if the author's tone grates on you, you might have a hard time with it. I love the author's tone. I love going from laugh-out-loud funny to whoa-gotta-think-about-this in the space of one paragraph.

Sarah Vowell embarked on a determined -- one might say "obsessive" -- quest to explore sites associated with the assassinations of three U.S. presidents: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley. If you're anything like me, just about the only thing you know about the latter two is that they were assassinated. In fact, the whole stretch between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt is a New Jersey Turnpike of presidential history: nothing sticks in the mind and the attention keeps wandering.

Once one gets off the highway, however, the detail is fascinating. Who knew, for instance, that Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, was part of the Oneida utopian community in upstate New York? Or that Leon Czolgosz, who killed McKinley, had the hots for Emma Goldman? (Actually that's not such a stretch, since Czolgosz was an anarchist.) Or -- conspiracy theorists, take note -- that Robert Todd Lincoln was in the vicinity of all three assassinations, in 1865, 1881, and 1901?

I didn't even realize that Stephen Sondheim had written Assassins, a Tony Award–winning musical about these people and a few more, some successful and some not. While following the trail of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial, Vowell sees a production of the play and over breakfast tries to convey her enthusiasm to her fellow guests at a staid B&B in western Massachusetts. It's pretty funny.

Vowell was traveling and writing Assassination Vacation as the George W. Bush administration was lying its way into a war on Iraq that turned out to be even more disastrous than the pessimists expected. From time to time, this bleeds through (uh, sorry about that) into the historical narrative, with the result that she feels a startling, fleeting empathy for the assassins, nearly all of whom felt on some level that killing the president was the best and maybe only way to change the nation's course. Reading it while demagogues do their damnedest to whip their followers into a frenzy that makes violence seem thinkable, even necessary . . . It's sobering, to say the least.

Anyhow, I'd recommend this book both to readers interested in U.S. history and politics and to those who think that U.S. history and politics are too boring to bother with. They aren't.

The most enjoyable book I have ever read about presidents getting murdered.

A reminiscence: Years ago, I persuaded/forced my then-girlfriend to take a trip with me to the Little Big Horn battlefield near Hardin, Montana. It was at the Little Big Horn that Lt. Col. George Custer came to grief, forever making his name a synonym for "bad decision." It was quite a trek to make in a single weekend: Omaha to Montana. So we got to the battlefield after 20 straight hours of driving; slept outside the Ranger station waiting for it to open; then took in the battlefield, unwashed and unshaven and without even a cup of coffee. I was giddy (with exhaustion? with historical glee?), she was...patient (later, after she broke my heart, she swore this wasn't the reason she left, though I'm not sure I believed her, then or now).

At one point, I drove up to Reno Hill. It was empty. As I was (and am) writing a novel about America's westward expansion from 1854 to 1890, I had certain items with me: two cameras, a couple books, a notebook and pen, binoculars. I got out of the car with my non-digital camera and took a walk along Reno's line of defense. Since no one was around, I broke a rule or two and gingerly lowered myself into one of the rifle pits that had been dug 129 years earlier. I wrote down my impressions: what I could see; what the grass felt like against my skin; how hot it must have been. Then I went back to the car to get my digital camera.

I checked on my girlfriend, asking, as though she were a dog, if she had enough air in the car. Then I took my camera back to the old rifle pit to take a series of pictures forming a 360 degree view from the hill. It was then I noticed that I had dangerously few pictures remaining. This was odd, since I hadn't used the camera at all. I started going through my pictures. It was one self-portrait after another, each taken by my girlfriend as she sat waiting in the passenger seat of my car. I guess my passion wasn't as infectious as my [insert STD joke here:].

The point of this story? Sara Vowell is the woman I should have taken on this trip. Assassination Vacation is meant for those people (I include myself here) who do things like drive overnight from Omaha to Montana in order to look at a battlefield, or who call the National Park Service while driving the backroads of Wyoming looking for the Grattan Massacre monument, which is located in Farmer McDonald's corn field, or who can't pass by a historical marker without pulling the car over and hopping out with a camera.

The skeleton on which this book rests is the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Really, though, it's sort of a romp, where history, pop culture, and current events elide. Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, along with their respective assassins, Booth, Guiteau, and Czolgosz, are simply the starting point. She visits the places connected with their lives and deaths, which are often nothing more than a plaque or a roadside sign. Often, the places are only tenuously connected, but that's part of the fun.

The book is written with good-natured humor (and a little angry liberalism thrown in for good measure). I noticed in her acknowledgments that she thanks, among others, Dave Eggers and David Sedaris (I am envious of her life; I mean, look at all awesome people she must chill with on a daily basis. Ira Glass! Lucky!) Not to be whatever, but Vowell is not as great a writer as her buds. She doesn't have the stratospheric talent of Eggers, or the subtle craftsmanship of Sedaris (which is not really a knock, when you think about it). When I read this book, it was more like reading a great blog, in which she introduces the many varied characters in her own life while taking this pseudo-journey among the ghosts of dead presidents.

I didn't laugh out loud but once, but I really had a good reading experience. Vowell totally seems like an awesome traveling companion. A person who has facts and stories for every place you go. I've been accused of this, so it's nice to know there are others in the world who respect a good factoid (come to Omaha, and I'll tell you the trivia behind our street names, which are named after generals of the Frontier Army...Grenville Dodge, who surveyed for the railroad; William Harney, who beat a slave to death...etc.) Kerouac famously wrote that the only people for him were the mad ones; the only people for me are the curious ones. Vowell's curiosity is infectious. She wanders far and wide, read voraciously, and along the way meets people as impassioned as she is (I especially enjoy her section on Dr. Samuel Mudd, where her own intense dislike for the possibly-treacherous medicine man butts up against the Mudd family's centuries-long quest to rehabilitate their ancestor's good name...and make a quick buck on the side).

Vowell's style is breezy and digressive. Reading it was like listening to a chatty companion sitting next to you in a car or train. She comes across as mostly-genuine, though once in awhile, I found myself thinking she's a little too precious. I mean, does she really wear Bela Lugosi hair clips? Is anyone that awesome?

The only (minor) quibble I have is the lack of any footnotes or bibliography. Obviously, this is not a work of scholarship. Yet Vowell tosses off hundreds upon thousands of factual nuggets. It would be nice to know, before I start repeating them at cocktail parties, that she didn't get them off of Wikipedia. Heck, I don't even care about the footnotes (P.S. I LOVE footnotes), just tell me what sources you consulted. At one point, she mentions Ackerman's Dark Horse, which I have on my Amazon wish list, but that's about it. For a book written by a historically curious person, which is sure to spark the curiosity of many others, it would've been a helpful service to list the authors and works that guided her.

The lasting thing from this book is its empathy. I love history. I think more than anything, good history teaches us what it means to be human. For instance, I was looking for a good Lincoln book and was struck by a reader comment saying, in effect, that the author was too easy on Mary Todd Lincoln, who the commenter believed was crazier than a port-o-potty rat. I couldn't believe what I'd read. Sometimes, I guess, the inundation of facts obscures something important: that these were people first, and trivia second. I mean, Mary Todd lost three of her four children; her husband was shot in the head while she held in his hand. If she went crazy after all this, well, buddy, that's craziness she earned. I think we view history too much in the abstract; as a bas relief in a museum. Imagine yourself in her place. Imagine your soul-mate murdered next to you while you're in the theater watching the latest low point in Seann William Scott's career. The folks in the history books, the ones staring at you from a distant netherworld called the Past, were - and this is verificable - real people. From their trials, we can learn. As your mother might have said, in times like these, remember, there have always been times like these.

History is at its most powerful when it shows us how we are all connected by certain immutable traits: how we are born; how we laugh; how we hurt; how we fall in love; how we suffer; how we die. Even the greatest, the richest, the most powerful humans who have ever walked this earth are brought down to the level of the lowliest peasant by these things. (I call this the Everybody Poops School of History - it will eventually be worked in my PhD thesis).

That's sort of the evolving understanding Vowell came to, especially when tracing the deaths of Garfield and McKinley. These are men who, especially in Garfield's case, have been lost to history. Yet we know them, intimately, by sharing their final moments. They become, at the end, finally, human.

I'll give any book that can discuss an obscure president like Garfield, yet keep my attention, five stars. Particularly fascinating are the author's travels from theaters, museum exhibits, plaques, historic buildings and monuments, demonstrating the many ways we choose to preserve (and interpret) our history. It is also a good reminder in our crazy political era that "the good old days" were about as nutty as the present.

Sarah Vowell, I think I love you. You’re everything I enjoy in a writer: witty, weird, well-written, honest, and (as a non-fiction writer) full of fun facts. Because I enjoyed Assassination Vacation so much, you get the coveted distinction of being an author whose books I will continue to purchase rather than hunt for at my local library. Hurrah!

This is the first Sarah Vowell book I’ve read. She’s been on my radar for a while. If you listen to NPR even only occasionally, she will find a way of sneaking into your ear. After years of being mildly interested, I decided, this is it! I’m going to investigate her quirky-titled books. I’m happy I did. Assassination Vacation (hereafter AV) explores the presidential assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Vowell travels to the locations central to her theme (usually by cajoling friends and her sister to take her as apparently she has a driving phobia) and along the way, she meanders into unexpected details about a national park that used to be a federal prison; Robert Todd Lincoln, the presidential jinx; and the Oneida company-that-now-sells-cookware-but-used-to-be-a-kinky-sex-cult. I love history and don’t think it’s possible to read too much of it. It’s even better if you read a variety of books about the same historical figures or time period—you can always discover a different perspective and new details. Because I recently read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s giant tome about Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft (The Bully Pulpit), Vowell’s discussion of McKinley’s assassination overlaps nicely and enhances the information I learned from Goodwin.

Vowell is very funny. I giggled quite often while reading this book and scribbled approving “ha ha!!!!” notes in the margins. I like the connection she makes between tourism and religious pilgrimages:

Somewhere on the road between museum displays of Lincoln’s skull fragments and the ceramic tiles on which Garfield was gunned down and McKinley’s bloodstained pj’s it occurred to me that there is a name for travel embarked upon with the agenda of venerating relics: pilgrimage. The medieval pilgrimage routes, in which Christians walked from church to church to commune with the innards of saints, are the beginnings of the modern tourism industry. Which is to say that you can draw a more or less straight line from a Dark Ages peasant blistering his feet trudging to a church displaying the Virgin Mary’s dried-up breast milk to me vomiting into a barf bag on a sightseeing boat headed toward the prison-island hell where some Lincoln assassination conspirators were locked up in 1865. (9)

Her humor is irreverent and often sly, hidden in sentences of historical facts.

AV was written during the reign of President George W. Bush. Vowell does not like him. In fact, she dislikes him so much that she can almost see how one could be driven to murder a president. She quotes Timothy Douglas, the director of the musical Assassins who feels the same way; he dislikes the current president so much that he can understand the murderous impulses of assassins—and that kind of freaks him out. What is so interesting (scary) is that how Vowell feels about Bush pretty much describes how I feel about Trump, and she dislikes Bush so much that she must be absolutely horrified by Trump. I’m going to quote her thoughts on this because a) it’s applicable to the current president and b) her discussion of egotism is fascinating and it relates to why she wrote this book:

Like director Tim Douglas, my simmering rage against the current president scares me. I am a more or less peaceful happy person whose lone act of violence as an adult was shoving a guy who spilled beer on me at a Sleater-Kinney concert. So if I can summon this much bitterness toward a presidential human being, I can sort of, kind of see how this amount of bile or more, teaming up with disappointment, unemployment, delusions of grandeur and mental illness, could prompt a crazier narcissistic creep to buy one of this country’s widely available handguns….I am only slightly less astonished by the egotism of the assassins, the inflated self-esteem it requires to kill a president, than I am astonished by the men who run for president. These are people who have the gall to believe they can fix us—us and our deficit, our fossil fuels, our racism, poverty, our potholes and public schools. The egomania required to be president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts….The assassins and the presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are? (7)

I really enjoyed Assassination Vacation. It’s funny, informative, interesting and Vowell’s prose is very personable and friendly. I feel like I could sit down next to her at the bar and discuss over cocktails how Trump deserves to be impeached, but if he’s out, that leaves us with Religious Freak Whitest Man Ever President Pence. And frankly, he scares the shit out of me even more than Trump. Overall, even if you don’t agree with Vowell’s politics (or her bold declaration of atheism—hooray!), it’s not necessary to enjoy her fun trip through historical assassinations. I look forward to reading more of her books.

Quick Addition to Review
In the second quoted passage above, Vowell says she is amazed at the egotism needed for a man (obviously written pre-Hillary) to run for president and think he can fix America's problems. When I read that quote again, it's funny at how innocent it seems now; she assumes that the men/women running for the office of president actually want to fix these things! My view is instead that many people run for political office not necessarily to "fix" anything, but to help themselves to money and power. If they want to "fix" anything, it's to turn back the progress we've managed to make: gay marriage, abortion rights, civil rights, etc. As a reader of history, I know this is nothing new, but it seems to me that more and more candidates conceal their power lust and greed and ideological intentions under the thinnest guise of wanting to help their fellow Americans. Or maybe, in the age of Trump--who is doing everything within in his power to make America Great Again for himself and wealthy people like him--I've just become incredibly cynical?

Those who listen to PRI's This American Life and then happen to listen to the audio version of this book will immediately recognize the sound of the author's voice. This book is similar like her radio essays except longer. She tells the story of visiting the sites related to the assassinations of three American presidents. She has a self depreciating way of finding humor and irony in everything she sees or does. So it comes across as funny commentary about a serious subject. Thus you can be entertained while learning interesting facts about American History.

My favorite quotation:
"You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality."
Before my Canadian friends complain, let me explain that I think the above is equally funny with any other nationality inserted.

Here's another one:
"That’s how ugly the scandal was--that turning human flesh into shrimp bait was the positive spin."
I'll let you wonder about the context for that comment.

The narrative branches out in unpredictable directions in a style that is almost chain-of-consciousness. But the road to many laughs can't be straight.

Published in 2005, Assassination Vacation is part-travelogue, part-history book and part-essay by Sarah Vowell, an American author, essayist, journalist and social commentator. I copied those descriptions from Wiki because they are very relevant and apparent in this book's overall feel. In the beginning of the story, Vowell says that she is afraid that someday when she is old and gray and her niece opens her photo album, she will see that all those pictures were taken from memorials, historical sites, gravesites and statues of assassinated American presidents. Funny, but I agree that Vowell seems to have fixations or obssession on assassinations.

That I think makes this book a league of its own. Unique. Vowell touring the sites where the likes of President Abraham Lincoln (assassin: John Wilkes Booth in 1865), President James Abram Garfield (assassin: Charles J. Guiteau in 1881) and President William McKinley (assassin: Leon Frank Czolgosz in 1901). Lincoln was the 16th, Garfield the 20th and McKinley the 25th presidents of the United States of America. It's good that the security has improved during our century. Otherwise, what would happen to the whole world if the occupant of the White House (who is the commander-in-chief of the world's police) is killed by an assassin every 4 or 5 of them?

This is an enjoyable and very informative read for a non-American like me. I learned a lot from Vowell. Examples are that the son of President Lincoln actually witness these 3 assassinations. That President Garfield (oh why did they name that cat after their beloved President?) served only 200 days in the office (the second shortest term as President) before he was killed in Potomac. However, what really made me very interested is President McKinley because he was the US President who decided to colonize Cuba and the Philippines. In his speech to the Congress, he even invoked his responsibility to God to colonize the Philippines to spread christianity and prevent the spread of anarchy, etc which is compared by Vowell to Bush invading Iraq to find the weapons for mass destruction (WMD) which is still to be found at the time of this writing explained Vowell.

Unfortunately, only around 50 pages are about President McKinley's life and assassination. More than half of the book are on President Lincoln. That is understandable because President Lincoln is one (if not the best) of the best presidents ever stayed in the White House. In my opinion at least.

I feel like Vowell and I would do great on a road trip together. We might never make it to our actual destination because we would be constantly pulling over to read the history signs that no one else I know will let me pull over to read, and I feel that we would be easily side tracked by historical detour, but man, we would learn a lot. Then again, her voice on the audiobook REALLY set me on edge, and if she sounds like that in person I might have to bail. Still, voice aside, I like the crazy, swirly way she tells history. History IS crazy, it’s like reading this really long cross-over novel series, and sometimes characters from other stories you read wander into the scene, and you get all excited that you NOTICED that, and feel like you are giving a secret nod to the author being like, I see what you did there, I see who that character is…. Only it’s all real, and you realize that history is super connected to everything, every single thing is interrelated. Sure, that’s kind of a “duh” statement, but it’s not how we teach history in schools where we parse it out in unconnected factoids labeled “American history, Pre-Reconstruction” and “Europe:1870-1935”, and it’s hard to convey in books because you have limited space, and you are trying to teach the history of the whole world, really, by writing about any one thing. It makes it complicated. But I LOVE that complication, its why almost all of my nonfiction books are history books, I revel in the intricacy that I will never be able to fathom, and I think Vowell is that type of person too. That love and passion is present in her somewhat erratic way of trying to tell the story of the Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley assassinations, and it made it interesting and easy to devour.

Still, I am left at a three-star rating for this particular book, though I certainly intend to continue on with her other books later. Why? Mostly because she spent so much time on Lincoln, to the point that McKinley and Garfield nearly felt like an afterthought. Sure, it’s *LINCOLN* but the book is not really breaking any new ground there, except for maybe enthusiasm in history. Garfield and McKinley, though not as iconic, were still presidential assassinations, and that’s huge, and combined I’m not sure their story quite takes up half of the book. I would have liked to see more of their stories, and a little bit more balance. The second reason is her comparison to the modern day Iraq War and Bush Administration. I am not saying that she doesn’t have a point; it’s that she doesn’t form an argument with merit. Mostly she takes potshots, and I am disappointed because, if she hadn’t spent so much time on Lincoln, SHE COULD HAVE DONE SO MUCH MORE. She could have really flushed out the comparison between Americans expansionism in the Pacific Islands to that Iraq, and it could have really added something to the book. Instead, she turns it into one-liners, that seem glib in the face of such dark, historical repetition.

So there ya have it. This book was fun and interesting, and I learned a bit. I will read her other works, but probably not listen to them on audio. It wet my appetite to know more about the underappreciated Garfield and McKinley, and rounded out my knowledge on the Lincoln assassination.

I know, I know, lately it seems that I've been fixated on dead presidents (and a new book about the assassination of James Garfield has just been published--don't worry, I'm on it) so Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation was just the book for me. It's a road trip to lots and lots of locations associated with the three assassinated presidents chosen by Vowell--Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Literally, I couldn't put this book down. I wanted to call AAA and begin booking my own pilgrimage. The beauty of this book is the scope of the "vacation" as Vowell investigates locations as far north as Alaska (to see the Lincoln and Seward totem poles) and as far south as the Dry Tortugas (where Dr. Samuel Mudd and several other conspirators in the Lincoln assassination were imprisoned). This book is part history, part travelogue, part personal reflection, and part social commentary. I know that I have repeatedly said that I want to be David Sedaris' best friend. And I still feel that way. But my first choice for a road trip is, without a doubt, Sarah Vowell.

Assassination Vacation is a Sarah Vowell travelogue across America exploring sights associated (no matter how tangentially) with the people and odd ephemera connected to the first three presidential assassinations. Sarah regales us with a steady patter of her obsessions with history, politics, and pop culture, all filtered through the self-indulgent quirkiness that is her personal brand. This comes across a lot like cilantro — some people will take a hard pass, but for those of us with a taste for it, this is a spicy-tangy good time.

Vowell leans hardcore into the morbid side of her quirky personal style, sometimes seeming like Wednesday Adams attempting stand up. She refers to Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son who was in close proximity to all three of these assassinations, as “some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom.” When speaking to her preschool nephew, along for the ride on her visit to the cemetery where John Wilkes Booth’s skull is buried, she says ”Remember that word I taught you at Christmas — decapitated?”

The first half of the book covers the Lincoln assassination. Garfield and McKinley’s assassinations split the remainder. This seems about right when considering their relative historical significance. Assassination Vacation is a fun ride if you’re a Vowell fan — perhaps the best of her several books.

I love Sarah Vowell! This is the best American history class you've never taken.

I love the author’s irreverence, wit, and humorous outlook. I find her hilarious when she’s speaking, such as when I’ve seen her on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. This book is funny, but her writing is not nearly as hilarious as she is when speaking. I think this book would be great as an audio book if read by the author. Even her voice and inflections are funny, and while I laugh out loud when listening to her, including when she talked about this book, reading this book elicited some smiles from me, but that’s about it. Of course, it’s only because of the author that I’d expected a book about Presidential assassinations would make me laugh.

I was disappointed that only 3 Presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley) were the focus here, and that they are all Republicans, although there are extremely brief mentions of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and a bit more than them about Teddy Roosevelt. And I loved that she revisited the Lincoln-Kennedy coincidence list; I hadn’t thought about it for many years.

There were some very amusing and educational portions, and for me it got better and better as I went along. I went from being disappointed to really enjoying the reading experience.

I particularly enjoyed the more personal material, particularly the part about the author’s young nephew. I can see why she likes as well as loves him.

I got a huge kick out of Garfield’s love of reading; he’s a president about which I’d known very little, and I’d known the most about Lincoln and very, very little about the other two, but from this book I learned a lot about all three. Now, I wasn’t reading for school, but for pleasure, and there were so many juicy tidbits that I’m afraid in very short order I will forget most of the information. This is history spiced up, but I’ve always enjoyed history and don’t need it to be made more palatable. However, I did really appreciate the information that isn’t typically included in history books, and even in many biography books

So, I did end up enjoying this, but she’s still much funnier in person.

3 ½ stars I rounded up because of this book’s ingenuity.