A quirky look at three assassinations; Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley(why no Kennedy?) as the author travels around to various locations related to each event. Vowell uses humor(dry to sardonic)with splashes of historical anecdotes in what I would consider more essay than history. Half the book is spent on Lincoln, Booth and his conspirators with stops at multiple locations including the Mudd home(which is apparently still difficult to find) and Fort Jefferson in Florida where the conspirators were incarcerated. There were some short, odd tangents in the remaining sections, in the Garfield/Guiteau section a fair amount of time is spent on the Oneida Community(Guiteau spent some time with the Oneida) and the McKinley/Czolgosz section veered in to some moments with Emma Goldman and Teddy Roosevelt's hasty return from Mount Marcy as McKinley took a turn for the worse.

While enjoyable, the approach of the book seemed a bit scattershot and I never felt compelled to keep reading at the expense of other things.


6/10

Vowell is so uniquely her own creature and in this book the pleasures abound.

Lot of awesome stuff here, but it started to run together a little bit for me. My favorite parts were when she was reacting to stuff at the sites. My least favorite parts were the histories leading up to the presidencies. I just wanted less detail, I think. Sarah, I still love you

"The problem with the fog of history, with the way the taboo against speaking ill of the dead tends to edit memorials down to saying nothing much more than the deceased subject's name, is that all the specifics get washed away, leaving behind some universal nobody. Martin Luther King Jr's last speech, in which he correctly prophesied that he "might not get there with you" to the Promised Land is all that's remembered of what he said. And that is astonishing. But that speech also contains clear-cut political suggestions for the very present moment, including a plea to those assembled to boycott the Coca-Cola Company "because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies."

Frederick Douglass, by calling forth Lincoln the man, by mapping how time and circumstance and experience changed him and deepened him and emboldened him to not just say the right thing and not just personally do the right thing, but make right the law, is the most meaningful of all possible tributes. Douglas, a former slave, marvels that the "infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln."

I brought Douglass's speech with me to the Freedmen's Memorial and I reread it, occasionally glancing up at the statue. As I'm scrutinizing the plaque about Charlotte Scott, a black woman with white hair walks past, staring at me. Smiling, she yells, "Emancipation Proclamation!" She turns away with a wave, calling out over her shoulder, "Freed the slaves, amen!"

There’s something about the way Sarah Vowell writes about history that brings it to life for me. Probably because there’s something about the way that Sarah Vowell writes about people, and history is made of people. It often doesn’t feel that way. (Ironically, there’s a section in here where she tells a story about a time where she ended up yelling at some guy in a supermarket about how the only time it would be interesting to live through history would be if you were there when they discovered the polio vaccine, otherwise it’s all war and natural disasters and the time in between. She manages to be funny while writing this.)

I’ve actually wanted to read Assassination Vacation for about eleven years now, since it was published, when a friend of mine wrote a glowing review of it in our college newspaper, and then almost immediately The Incredibles came out (Sarah Vowell voices Violet in that movie). I was like, who is this Sarah Vowell person who goes on weird assassination vacations and then voices teenage superheroes?? But I kept getting distracted, and the height of my desire to read it coincided with the two years I didn’t have a car and lived on campus, and thus did not have easy access to the public library and very little money to spend on books. So wah wah long story, didn’t read it for forever, but now I have.

The cheekily ingenious conceit behind this book is that Vowell embarks on a sort of historical tourism of the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. This involves visiting their graves, the sites of their demises, important locations in their lives, and all of the same for their assassins, whom Vowell finds just as interesting in parts as their targets. She then writes about not only the experience of visiting those places (including the people she encounters there), but also the history and context of the events and the sites themselves.

If you’ve never read a Sarah Vowell book before, this turns out to be surprisingly fun. If you have, well, you pretty much know what to expect. Vowell gets REALLY enthusiastic about stuff that most people don’t give two shits about, and her enthusiasm is catching. I’m not saying I’m suddenly all about dead presidents, but while I was reading the book, it was interesting and fun. Vowell goes deep in her love of history, like a true nerd of whatever you’re nerdy about, and the book is all the better for it.

I was also surprised by the content of the book. I fully expected to love the Abraham Lincoln section the most, but since I already know so much about the guy, Vowell and her observations were really the main draw there. I knew almost nothing about Garfield or McKinley going in to this book, so I actually enjoyed those sections a little more. (And I now have actual opinions about several presidents and overlooked historical figures! Namely, Garfield was actually kind of a cool guy, McKinley was an asshole, and Teddy Roosevelt was a baller. Don’t even get me started on John Wilkes Booth’s brother, Edwin. That guy was awesome!)

Anyway, you guys should read this book if you like history, especially if you like your history focused on the more obscure human details, with a side of wry, humorous observations. Also if you want to read about how the Oneida tableware and cutlery company was founded by a sex cult from upstate New York.

2023 52 Book Challenge - 50) Related To The Word Murder

This book starts out by talking about the musical Assassins by Stephen Sondheim, and considering how much I love that, the book pulled me right in. I appreciated how it looked at the assassinations a little differently, even if the majority of the book focused on Lincoln and Booth.

My middle school history teacher had herself a fattie girl crush on Sarah Vowell. She would literally invoke the wanna-be historian's name every other week, staring at the class with a ferocity that had me convinced she thought we were some kind of mirror she could summon the Incredibles out of if she mentioned the "hilarious," "clever," and "ingenious" Ms. Vowell enough times. The owner of Violet's lilting voice never showed, but I like to think my teacher would be pleased to know that her trials weren't completely in vain; some 20 years later, Vowell's best acclaimed book found its way onto my Kobo as a palate cleanser between my literary climbs up the mountain that is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Assassination Vacation is literally about an assassination vacation. Over the course of a cross-country pursuit of historical markers connected to the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley, Vowell dishes a stream-of-conscious narrative fraught with reflections, observations, and sidebars that relate to her trip and the historical significance of that which once was. I really liked how she would go about exploring the disparate mindstates and intentions of each president's assassin, as well as honoring the memory of each president in a way that accurately reflects modern impressions of their legacy. I totally forgot James Garfield was even a president, something that Vowell acknowledges humorously, if not also a little disparagingly.

The milieu of history, observation, and humor is key to the appeal of Vowell's work; she makes history feel accessible and relatable in a way that reminds me of what Lin-Manuel Miranda did with his Hamilton musical. She doesn't aim all that high or act like a tryhard, but I appreciate her all the more for that.

4.5 stars - the chapter about Lincoln is definitely the best, the book is funniest when Sarah Vowell is in the story itself. I really want to see the musical Assassins now.

Somehow I listened to this entire audiobook in two days. I felt burned by politics and somehow in my head this translated to - more politics! I thought reading about assassinations might be... refreshing.

Enter Sarah Vowell with her strange voice, and a host of stories of informational plaques that she visited around the country, and other monuments to assassination attempts. There is a lot on Lincoln, but I still learned some tidbits. Did you know it is likely President Lincoln was laughing when he was shot?

The last chapter had an interesting intersection with other books I've read, such as The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, because it focused in on Emma Goldman, the delightful anarchist who was greatly feared in her time. Not a president, but definitely political, and assassination attempts going both ways.

This is well researched, she makes obscurity interesting, and it was a nice diversion from the present day.

My only disappointment with the audiobook is that the cover makes it seem like the other voices will have prominent roles, but they are only very occasionally brought in to read a quotation. I would have loved to hear less Vowell and more Conan O'Brien, Stephen King, and Jon Stewart. That said her voice is definitely distinct.

Another one I didn't finish, and I'll try and save you the trouble of starting. The book was relatively entertaining when it was talking about the assassinations of the title (Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley),
especially Lincoln - Vowell devotes the largest slice of the book to him and John Wilkes Booth. However, over time I got tired of the author taking every opportunity to take juvenile shots at the Bush administration, the Iraq war, and Republicans in general. It might have been interesting in an actual, serious book about politics, but this is not that - instead, Vowell's political criticism is just above the level of "Bush is the devil! All Republicans are stupid!" Honestly, it just got tiring. I was into the last chapter ("McKinley's behavior in the Philippines is just like Bush's in the Iraq war! Also, the Indians were oppressed!"), and I just didn't care enough to read the last 40 pages. A book actually comparing the Iraq war and the Bush administration, to historical administrations, could be quite interesting. And an actual lighthearted look at these assassinations, which is what I thought I was getting, could have been very enjoyable. Someone who's trying to do both, with the skill of a newly radicalized college freshman, is just....lame.

As with all of Vowell’s books, this is frank, funny, and informative. She always digs up the most peculiar and absurd facts about people and events, and her wry wit makes time pass in a flash.

I listened to the audiobook for this, and Brad Bird, writer-director of movies like The Iron Giant, The Incredibles I & II (where he voices the inestimable superdesigner Edna “No capes!” Mode) and Ratatouille, is the stand-out celebrity voice here. He goes full histrionic batshit in his rendition of Charles Giteau, the obviously insane assassin of President Garfield.

Someone who is only sort-of into non-fiction will find themselves laughing out loud and thinking to themselves, "Wow. I really like history! Who knew?"