Doubleday - September 20, 2011
339 pages
President James Abram Garfield was the twentieth president of the United States and a dark horse who never wanted to be president. He was a relatively young man, forty-nine when inaugurated, and liked hugs and reading. Meanwhile, Charles J. Guiteau was a conman who was kicked out of the Oneida community for his arrogance and published a plagiarism of the community's founder's book, calling his version The Truth. Guiteau survived a shipwreck and decided that God had singled him out for something special. When Garfield is inaugurated, Guiteau asks to be ambassador to first Austria and then France. When Garfield and Secretary of State James G. Blaine refuse him this, Guiteau realizes that God singled him out to kill the president.
I first got an interest in the Garfield assassination when I saw the musical Assassins by Stephen Sondheim, which is about, you guessed it, assassins. Guiteau was almost like the fop of the musical, a bold figure who believed that the Garfield administration said he could be ambassador to France and who eventually cakewalks up to the gallows singing a song he penned on death row. Interestingly enough, the song that he sings up there, "I Am Going to the Lordy", he actually did write on death row! I had not learned much about Garfield from the musical, and yet I grew to sympathize with the man who never wanted the job that ended up killing him all while laughing at Guiteau's attempt to kill the president when he was at a sermon, but Guiteau was so enraged at the preacher's ideas he yelled out and then ran away. The book is informative, humorous, and engaging.
Grade: A
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