Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
Doubleday
9/20/2011
Audiobook
339 pages
James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men 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.
Three sentence summary:
Story of the assassination of James Garfield by an unlikely assassin. Not only reveals an innocence of America during this time (1881), but also the primitiveness of the medical profession. The influence that Thomas Lister and Alexander Graham Bell had on the saving lives AFTER Garfield’s is astonishing to someone in this day.
Review:
This book kept me interested the entire time. Despite feeling terribly sorry for the suffering of Garfield after he was shot, the book revealed a good man who likely could have gone on to make a good President. It does a great job of weaving the stories of Garfield, Lister, Bell and Guiteau into a connected story. While there are times when I felt sympathy for Guiteau, I mostly saw him as a man who could not take control of himself and was routinely looking for a way out to ease his own conscience. Perhaps he was in fact insane, but troubled doesn’t begin to tell it. Lister and Bell were both ahead of their time, and both were not as respected as they should have been for their foresight.