Cinema Tuesdays Review

Death Trippin'
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
(Simon & Schuster)
Book review by Nathan Cone

Sarah Vowell, known by public radio listeners as one of the regular voices heard on "This American Life," and by movie fans as the voice of Violet Parr in Pixar's "The Incredibles," is building a name for herself as a historical researcher and author. Her last book, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, took a broad approach to history through personal essays. Assassination Vacation delves deep into the stories behind the slayings of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, and it does so with a snap and wit that keeps the reader interested.

Vowell connects the dots with each of the assassinations, following the gunman's back-story to find out about his associates and political ambitions, if any. Her research leads her on a road trip that covers just about the entire country, from Alaska, to Illinois, to Washington, to New York, and even Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas National Park, which is more west than Key West, Florida. It's a place I never even knew existed until reading Vowell's book; the four men convicted of plotting Lincoln's murder were exiled here in 1865.

Vowell's road trip takes the reader to many of these far-flung and unseen places, to blow the dust of these memorials, old buildings, and plaques, to uncover the hidden or forgotten connections between historical figures we only know by name. How many of us know the hidden connection between Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth's brother) and Robert Todd Lincoln? Can you believe that Booth once saved Lincoln's life?

On the DVD of "The Incredibles," Vowell remarks that Abraham Lincoln is "like a superhero" to her, and so she spends the greatest amount of time on our Sixteenth President in Assassination Vacation. But Vowell's death romp also took her to sites associated with William McKinley and James Garfield. In Garfield's chapter, it's quite a revelation to learn that Charles Guiteau, the President's assassin, before his foiled attempts to gain a political appointment from the White House, was once a member of what Vowell describes as "a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed 'Bible communists' before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry." You may have some of their plates at home yourself. The name of the community? Oneida.

Vowell also acknowledges that obscure Presidents may not be everyone's cup of tea when she recalls how she told a friend how she was planning to write about the McKinley administration. But she draws striking parallels between McKinley's world and our own. In fact, reading Assassination Vacation, it's clear that the past keeps haunting our present. Watching the Preakness at home on May 21, I noted to my relatives that only one stanza of "Maryland, My Maryland" was sung before the horse race, and it sure as hell wasn't the one that Vowell quotes from in her book, the one that says Maryland "spurns the northern scum" and warns that "the despot's heel is at thy shore." The despot, in this case, being Lincoln, as the poem "Maryland, My Maryland," was written in 1861.

If there is one thing that comes across in Assassination Vacation, it is Vowell's passion for history, and it is infectious. My favorite passage in the book comes near the end, when Vowell explains how even the most garish monuments can be given new life through understanding and personal experience. Acknowledging the controversy over the recently dedicated World War II Memorial's design, Vowell nevertheless is moved when she sees the "Oklahoma" pylon, because her uncle from there served in the Philippines.

Though the contemporary political opinions of Vowell may offer a few roadblocks for some readers of Assassination Vacation, overall, the book is an illuminating look at some of the darker moments of American history.

5/26/05

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