The Lesser Known Assassination

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If you're anything like me you probably know quite a bit about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, but not a whole lot about James A. Garfield.  Our book club read Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President this past month, and it was fabulous. 

I should point out that I tend to be a lover mostly of fiction, but this book was so good.  It practically reads as a novel even though it's nonfiction.  It's hands down one of the best biographies I've ever read, and it was absolutely fascinating from the very first page.  I highly recommend this book.

Here's a summary of the book:

"James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his con­dition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet."