The Book for March is Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard.
The next Greedy Reader meeting will be Tuesday, March 24.
From Library Journal - Millard (The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey)
presents a dual biography of the 20th U.S. President and his assassin.
James A. Garfield and Charles Guiteau were both born into hardscrabble
Midwestern circumstances. While Garfield made himself into a teacher,
Union army general, congressman, and President, Guiteau, who was most
likely insane, remained at the margins of life, convinced he was
intended for greatness. When he failed to receive a position in
Garfield's administration, he became convinced that God meant him to
kill the President. At a railway station in the capital, Guiteau shot
Garfield barely four months into his term. Garfield lingered through the
summer of 1881, with the country hanging on the news of his condition.
In September he died of infection, apparently due to inadequate medical
care. Millard gives readers a sense of the political and social life of
those times and provides more detail on Guiteau's life than is given in
Ira Rutkow's James A. Garfield. The format is similar to that in The
President and the Assassin, Scott Miller's book on President McKinley
and Leon Czolgosz. VERDICT Recommended for presidential history buffs
and students of Gilded Age America. [See Prepub Alert, 3/7/11.]—Stephen
L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Lib., Parkersburg
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