Summary: 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.
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.
Meticulously
researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and
high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand
alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the
Madman as a classic of narrative history.
My Review: Wow. Wow! To start, you know what? The GOP has nothing to worry about.
Millard has painted such a complete picture of Garfield’s political
career, and as a political geek, it was fascinating. I must admit, Garfield was always a footnote
in my mind. I vaguely recalled that he
was assassinated, but I don’t remember much more of his time in office. Again, it was truly a fascinating time in
history. Nominated to the presidency
against his wishes, he won by a landslide and incurred the wrath of one of the
most powerful men in Washington, oddly, one of his own party. Potential cabinet members were kidnapped and
threatened in order to stack the cabinet against the favor of the
President. There were rumors (wholly
unfounded) linking the Vice President and his cronies to the assassination, and
bone-chilling descriptions from the assassin himself, who truly believed that
by assassinating the president, he was assuring himself a spot in the new
President’s cabinet. Yes, the man was
cracked.
Millard
makes the chilling case that it was the ineptitude of his physicians (the
“chief” of these was actually self-appointed and refused to leave the case)
that ultimately caused the death of the President, months after the initial
attack. Were the events to have unfolded
merely ten years in the future, he would have probably been back at work in a
matter of weeks. It was truly astounding
to read of Alexander Graham Bell’s involvement in the attempts to save the
President’s life, how the events of the World’s Fair a few years prior could
have altered history, had American doctors embraced these assumingly-theoretical
“germs” that Dr. Joseph Lister kept going on about, and how misled the medical
community was at the time.
My Rating: Easily four stars.
Sum it Up: A fascinating
analysis of the assassination of President James A. Garfield.
For the Sensitive
Reader: There is quite a fair amount
of medical discussion, and some pretty graphic descriptions of the sepsis that
ravaged the President’s body.
2 comments:
Read this for book club in October -- liked it then...but it has grown on me since then -- especially after watching Lincoln -- The Movie...just a really good book.
Sounds interesting. I read a history of medicine book a long while ago that mentioned this assassination very briefly and the jist of the couple of paragraphs was that the doctor botched it, but it sounds like it was a much more interesting tale than that. Thanks for the review- I'll look for this book.
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