I had read this book once before and remembered its having interesting historical facts. This second time I also enjoyed it, especially learning about presidents Garfield and McKinley and their era, since today they are rather faded. Vowell did a good job in bringing them back to life again, especially poor Garfield, as she saw it, since he has been so forgotten. He was rather a nonentity even at the time, and only served 4 months before being shot by a lunatic at the age of 49. He hung on for another 2 months before dying. And no, the cat cartoon character has nothing to do with him

McKinley at least gave his name to the mountain (although that may be changed soon) and served a little longer, making it into his second term before being shot by yet another deranged person.

Vowell recounts some interesting facts about campaigning back then, when it was thought to be unseemly for a candidate to campaign, and both Garfield and McKinley gave 'porch campaigns' where they spoke to crowds from their front porches. Both must be turning in their graves with what goes on today.

I am glad she chose not to include the JFK assassination because it has been so widely covered. Her chapters on the Lincoln one, and the assassins, is very well done, in spite of having been covered so many times before by so many authors.

This book was fun and interesting but really seems to lose its way/go off course at points

I very much enjoyed this book about the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Sarah Vowell’s writing style is witty and humorous and she makes history interesting and exciting- I found myself laughing out loud several times. She also has a great way of connecting with people and incorporating her own personal experiences with weird and unique historical tidbits. Anyone who can make one of the most boring time periods in American history entertaining is a special type of person!!

A woman's humorous and simultaneously depressing obsession with the assassinations of presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Vowell's walk-through on each president and assassin is strewn with strange nuggets of connections, weird coincidences, and other things you won't read about anywhere else. She's funny as hell. Assassination Vacation Book Review

I am perplexed as to how this has such a high rating. Am I missing something?!

I wasn't a fan of the vibe of the book. The serious tone that then transitions into this snarky, try hard commentary is just odd. I love me some sarcasm, but this author was just plain mean with some of the people she met during her travels. Even the author picture leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Something about her does not mesh well with me, even if she was in The Incredibles ^_^

Another issue I have is just my personal taste. I tend to not like history mixed in with memoir factoids from authors. It is not usually my thing, especially with this type of book. Unfortunately, I felt like this was more personal anecdotes & a road trip journal than the history of assassinations I was more interested in.

Abraham Lincoln. James Garfield. William McKinley. What do these three men have in common? They were all Presidents of The United States of America. And they were all assassinated.

Not everyone would think to create a road-trip out of the deaths of these men, but Sarah Vowell did. She visits museums commemorating these sad events, she searches out graves, historical plaques, and former homes.

I was not at all certain I would enjoy reading this book, to tell the truth. For one thing, my mother wanted me to read it. That is not always a good thing. But we had both read Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates a couple of years ago, and when she saw this title in her favorite bookseller's catalog, she ordered it, read it, and gave it to me.

I remembered Vowell as being a little too smart-alecky for my taste in Shipmates, even though I did learn a lot about the Puritans that I never imagined. In Vacation, her tone is much less stridently sassy, and for me much easier to get along with. And once again I learned a lot about the history I was supposed ot have learned in school, but never heard about. Lincoln, yes. But Garfield and McKinley? Nary a word that I can recall.

Vowell covers a lot of information here, and presents it in a compelling way that kept me picking up the book and not wanting to put it down. I hope that someday she writes about the years 2017 to 2020. I would love to see what she does with that topic. While I'm waiting for that book to come along, I will look for other titles by Vowell and see what else my history teachers skipped.

This was some real History geek reading which was the perfect companion for a few days of teaching online. Heaps of fun on audio. If presidential history, assassinations, or the expression and development of historical memory are your niche, this is absolutely for you. I had heaps of fun with this.

In every creative writing program, an insanely big deal is made of Voice—discovering a Voice, having a Voice, having a unique Voice, maintaining your unique Voice, I can’t follow the story but oh that Voice, yes it’s misogyny but what a Voice!

The concept of voice is another in the long list of writing program sillynesses (others: science fiction isn’t legitimate writing, it’s not O.K. to admit influence from well-known writers, and the word poignant means something). But there is no doubt that having a singular voice in one’s writing can help talk one’s way from tattered manuscript to cloth-bound, ISBN’ed, publicity-toured book. It’s one of the rare places where writing program, lit mag, and acquisitions editor office overlap: great voice = great writing (= great $).

Writer and This American Life storyteller Sarah Vowell—author previously of The Partly Cloudly Patriot and other books—has such an amusing spoken voice—as any six-year-old or Daily Show watcher can now tell you—that Pixar had her voice the character of Violet in The Incredibles. Coming out of a kid’s mouth, her voice is squashed, the breaks and rasps always audible in her NPR and book-tour readings seemingly all that’s left. Coming out of the real-life, adult, on-the-page Sarah Vowell, though, her voice is the spillings out of anyone awkwardly and energetically overcompensating.

And, boom, there’s her charm, and the charm of Assassination Vacation, Vowell’s latest book-length road trip along another unnoticed plane of American history, in this case the tourism of American presidential assassinations.

Lest you wonder how this could be a worthy subject, Vowell offers that there’s a parallel to relical pilgrimage, which speaks to the supposed fervor or irrationality of those who would abandon all security to travel a thousand miles to inhale the healing dust of a saint. But Vowell’s obsession (and voice) affixes itself instead to the caretakers of American reliquaries—the tour guide of the house where John Wilkes Booth stopped to resupply after shooting President Lincoln; the ranger in charge of Dry Tortugas National Park, where Booth’s doctor/convicted accomplice was imprisoned; the manager of the freakish Oneida Community mansion in upstate New York, where lived the serially unpopular Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau. If medieval pilgrimage speaks more about the pilgrim than the saint, then it undercuts the fun of Assassination Vacation that only conscripted schoolchildren, the elderly, and Sarah Vowell actually visit these places. She has no pilgrims to talk to. Her writing about the caretakers—people largely there by dint of circumstance, people who grew into their interest rather than stalked it—feels like an editorial save more than the heart of a good story.

Aye, but the Voice. Vowell’s style really is the engine of her books, and her “shenanigans,” as she and This American Life boss Ira Glass call her tangents, have coalesced into a discreet skill to pack researched and lived events into the smallest page-space possible. Her seeming desperation to push her imagination in every historical-narrative direction leads to well-earned, well-appreciated, and well-Voiced wonderings like the following:

My head tells me autopsies after murders are routine, that before Ford’s Theater turned into a shrine it was a crime scene, that of course the evidence of the crime was analyzed, then archived, that Abraham Lincoln was not just a martyr or a myth but a case file, what the pros nowadays call a “vic.” So the evidence here calls up the corporeal presence of Lincoln (pieces of his head—gross—and Booth, who bought this very bullet, put said bullet in his pistol, then into Lincoln, which struck the skull, thereby chipping off these little pieces of it, mashing the bullet itself. These well-labeled, well-lit artifacts also suggest the existence of: the autopsy surgeon, the file clerk who catalogued and stowed them, the curator who decided to put them on display, the carpenter who built the display case, etc.

It’s always a fine thing when writers get readers to sneak their minds into freshly hewn nooks. The large-context problem though with Assassination Vacation is that Vowell provides no hierarchy. Despite the aggressive leveling of story structures in the last decades, readers still need a way to know what things are more important than other things. Vowell’s voice doesn’t allow this, because she’s equally excited about everything. It’s an intoxicating enthusiasm, to be sure, but only for a time. She pulls the reader along with her to obscure sites, to view obscure plaques, to reflect on obscure statues and houses and legends, but in the end she violates another writing program rule, one that’s actually true—and she admits as much—that stories don’t work if their only force for cohesion is coincidence. Coincidence, after all, is only in the eye of the beholder.

Thus, there are some buried gems of American history in Assassination Vacation but without an organizing force beyond Vowell’s own Voice, beyond her own obsessions and will, you might find yourself asking to be let off the tour.

I picked this book up as a recommendation from Strand in Manhattan. Not knowing what to expect, I was all at once pleasantly surprised and supremely disappointed. To me, the biggest thing that jumps out about this author's style is that she is the Chuck Klosterman of political history. The plot follows the author through road trips and vacations to various spots of historical significance and her stories are advanced through a combination of her interactions with the everyday people there and her own historical narrative. This is very similar to "Killing Yourself to Live", except rather than introspective tangents on the author's interpersonal relationships (which allow the reader to get closer to and relate to the author) she goes off on pointless political tangents that run completely counter to the overall tone of the book.

The author does her best writing when she stays primarily in the realm of tongue in cheek chasing of useless trivia. Being a history buff (and big Lincoln fan), it was very interesting to read about some of the circumstances surrounding these events. However, every couple dozen pages, she does a very poor job of relating these past events to current ones. The change from an irreverent writing style to a very serious political (and overtly far left-wing) rant is a jarring one for the reader. Overall, this book's biggest problem is its lack of identity. The author is never really sure if she wants to be a fun lark through the pages of history, or a cautionary tale of learning from our past mistakes. Holding witty banter with tour guides on the same page as trying to determine the groundwork of today's controversial (and in her opinion, evil) Republican Party is just a bit too much for me.

Really entertaining take on the Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley assassinations.

"Being part of history is rarely a good idea."

Man, I really wish I had crossed this one off of my to-read list sooner. You see, I enjoy history, but I have a hard time getting into nonfiction books. Most of them are bone dry and deadly dull, in my experience. Wading through the options to find a good one was always excruciating to me.

I always preferred taking a history class with an instructor who had a lot of personality. One of my high school history teachers got so into tales of medieval mayhem that he'd dart back and forth between two blackboards, desperately scrambling to find space to scrawl out more information as he told us about the black death. His enthusiasm and wit made the subject come to life for the first time, and not just be a collection of names and dates. Later, when I took a college history class about the Reformation, I encountered a cantankerous and alarmingly elderly professor. Perhaps due to his age, he sat down the whole class and just told us stories, occasionally lobbing acid barbs at the jocks unsuccessfully trying to hide in the back row. It was captivating. He made Reformation England the best soap opera not on television. It was the first time I thought of history as having a narrative, just like a novel but real. People in the past had personalities! Who knew? The following semester I took a class on the Civil War with a professor who could only be described as a bitchy queen, but that man knew his shit and was hilarious. He could have had an amazing TV show: The Bitchy Queen's Guide to History. It would win every single Emmy, and he'd roll his eyes at least once in every acceptance speech.

Those are the people who made history come alive to me. The reason I'm telling you all this is because you can add Sarah Vowell to that list now. She's droll, witty, and totally sarcastic. I love it. “You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.” Hilarious. So is this: “Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot." But she's also crazy informative and ridiculously thorough. She understands history from all angles. She knows all the competing theories. She knows all the events that caused one thing to lead to another and is capable of conveying that information without giving you a migraine.

Best of all, she has an emotional relationship to history. In this book, Vowell explores the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, and during her quest she makes an effort to understand each of them. What kind of men were they? We're not just looking at how they died, we're looking at how they lived. When she visits McKinley's memorial Vowell remarks that she didn't feel any closer to the former president, but when she visits the plaque commemorating the location where he was fatally shot she is surprised to find herself emotionally overwhelmed. She visits the neighborhoods they called home, the locations where they worked, and the museums that house their belongings, all to get a better sense of who they were.

It's not just the presidents who get this treatment, it's also the men responsible for their deaths and others who were affected by them. She visits the location of the barn where John Wilkes Booth was killed after law enforcement caught up with him. She checks in on the Grammercy Park statue of Wilkes' brother Edwin, who was a celebrated actor in New York despite his infamous sibling. She hangs out on the decaying pier in Long Branch where President Garfield was taken to die. She periodically checks in on Robert Todd Lincoln--Abraham's eldest son, who was present at all three assassinations covered in this book. She even takes a jaunt to the Dry Tortugas off Key West (and gets seasick in the process), just to see where Dr. Samuel Mudd--who may or may not have been a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination--was held.

The sense you come away with, beyond the knowledge of the assassinations, is the sense that history is a living organism, continuing to be shaped and molded every second of every day. As a New Yorker, I just so happen to live in one of the cities she frequently mentions. I actually noted each of the locations in case my path ever crosses the historical markers. Best of all was when she mentioned the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where the Republican party of Garfield's day did a lot of its wheeling and dealing. It was located on 5th and 23rd St.--the very same corner I work on. I was almost late for work because I had to run across the street and scout out the location I thought she was talking about (I was right! The building where Eataly is stands there now). I spent my lunch break walking through Madison Square park to find the statues of Chester A. Arthur and Roscoe Conkling that she mentioned. I have a completely new sense of the space I work now--I understand something of the history of my place, what is here now and what was here before, and it's exciting!

That's what is so great about Assassination Vacation--it brought out the history nerd in me, which has been relatively (sadly) dormant ever since I finished reading Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. It actually took me longer to read than it should have because I kept stopping to do internet research for myself to find out more or to see what Vowell is describing for myself. And I cannot wait to pick up another one of her books to do it all again.

Grade: A

History nerds, don't miss this book. Treat yourself and see to it that you listen to it on audiobook. I'm sure it's an interesting read in text form, but Sarah Vowell's reading of it takes it to a new level of brilliance. (This from a girl who doesn't usually like audiobooks.)