The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 April 2009
by Sarah Vowell
American history is pretty well preserved. Across the nation, there are Civil War battlefields, museums, old houses, monuments, tombs, statues and plaques. Still, every once in a while, there is the story of some bit of history having taken place in some forgotten tavern that is now falling apart, a bit of history that is slated to be razed for a strip mall or office park. We do lose our history this way, bit by bit. In a sense, that is the natural order of things. Often, though, once a historical site is identified, Americans tend to revere it and to freeze it in some arrested version of what it must have been like when whatever happened there happened. The gift shops spring up, the roadside attractions, complete with swag plastered in images of the event that happened there, everything from thimbles to underwear. It's the way we do things. Americans, perhaps in particular, venerate sites at which great disasters have happened. Ground Zero in New York is our latest holy site. But there's Pearl Harbor, too. Is there something about great moments in death that especially attract us? Not surprisingly, there are many landmarks to the momentous assassinations of both Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy. Ford's Theater is a reconstruction of Lincoln's last night on Earth. The school book depository in Dallas is a museum of Kennedy's last limo ride. The wonder that these sites are so well preserved is exceeded by how very popular they are. People want to stand at the spots where great historical events happened, and if people died there, all the better. It is just how we are wired. We are fascinated by this stuff. Sarah Vowell, whose pixie-ish voice is well known to listeners of NPR's This American Life, sets out to explore the nature of our relationship to certain historical events in this intense, amusing and breezy book. She sets for herself the task of visiting the sites and reflecting on the context of three American presidential assassinations. Abraham Lincoln is obvious enough, and there are many historical artefacts to be found, so the largest part of the book goes to him. He was followed into dark history by James Garfield and William McKinley. Vowell also selected these three killings because, coincidentally and creepily, each was witnessed by Robert Todd Lincoln, son of a murdered president. In her idiosyncratic manner, with her gift for teasing out modern analogies to historical events, Vowell visits these sites and sets their various histories into their various contexts with wit, humor and, often enough, sarcasm and anger. After all, she can convincingly tie events of the Spanish-American war of 1898 to those of the Iraq war that was just starting when this book was published. We visit a museum that morbidly displays Lincoln's skull fragments. Another displays some unidentified piece of John Wilkes Booth. We see the floor tile on which Garfield was shot. And there's just a plaque on the site of McKinley's shooting. There are homes preserved from each of the presidents, but also those of Wilkes's conspirators, political allies and foes, and oddly enough, and yet connected, the home of the sex-cult Oneida community. What is impressive is how much we can find in the landscape, how many of the historical events tie together in a tightly woven story of American history and culture. Playing with a McKinley gravesite yo-yo might not get you the view you're looking for, but Vowell makes it clear that our own history is as idiosyncratic as whoever wants to explore it and find its unlikely and often amazing connections. You might not even know who McKinley was. Some might be more fascinated with the killers than the victims. Vowell is not a historian, but she has a keen sense of how history repeats itself. There are many familiar threads in those events nearly a century and a half ago. The book rambles a bit, sprawling across pieces of its history. It is a kind of joyride through these events and, more compellingly, these places, relics we can still see and which tell a story for the attentive traveler. The book is a rambunctious view of our history.
Also by Sarah Vowell: [Unfamiliar Fishes]