Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer
This new year may be but one month gone, but I think we have a clear contender for the best non-fiction book of 2006 in James L. Swanson’s MANHUNT: THE 12-DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN’S KILLER. Everyone knows the story of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre the night of April 14, 1865, but what happened afterward is, arguably, a story every bit as interesting, if far less often told.
Swanson’s book puts a real face on Lincoln’s murderer, egotistical actor/lothario John Wilkes Booth. A Confederate sympathizer and white supremacist, Booth was angered at the President both for the surrender of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War and the President’s subsequent decision to award blacks the right to vote, which Booth decried as “nigger citizenship.” MANHUNT’s first third deals with the planning, execution and immediate aftermath of the assassination, not at all the simple, point-and-shoot affair as textbooks would have you believe. With a band of recruited conspirators, Booth first had hatched a plot to kidnap the leader; when that was thwarted, he seized on the opportunity of Lincoln’s public appearance at Ford’s, formulating a new plan in less than a day, no less complex.
Except this one was no mere kidnapping. And it called for the simultaneous murders of Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Booth left those to his associates, who promptly botched them (you’ll find all the details, ranging from the gory to the comic, here), while taking the biggest assignment for himself. After succeeding, he broke his leg jumping on the theater stage in his escape. That fracture should have proved an omen to the week and a half that followed, a bizarre series of misadventures that occasionally find him in good luck, but more often find him at the mercy of his injury, grown so large he cannot remove his boot. At one point in his journey that crosses three state lines, Booth loses a day when he inadvertently rows the wrong way up the Potomac, and near the end meets his fate in the form of a man who has castrated himself. I certainly don’t remember learning that in Mrs. Denton’s class.
So hateful of the powers that be and showing no remorse for his crimes, Booth struck me as the precursor to Timothy McVeigh, albeit with the added value of charm, talent and good looks. You get to know him well, so strict are his politics, so deluded his thinking. Swanson’s narrative is wholly absorbing, as it reads like fiction. Assembled from original sources, it also has the benefit of being real. It really is, as he writes in his introduction, “far too incredible to have ever been made up.”
With its wide array of colorful characters both good and bad, and Booth’s every hour accounted for, MANHUNT plays out like a colonial version of 24. It is the most accessible and suspenseful true-to-life tale since Erik Larson’s THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. Beautifully designed and supplemented with period photographs and illustrations, it also certainly stands as the definitive book of its subject. I don’t often read history books because I find them so dry, but MANHUNT is alive. It’s one to savor. –Rod Lott
[...] • Finally, don’t overlook MANHUNT: THE 12-DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN’S KILLER, the true account of John Wilkes Booth after he pulled the trigger on President Abraham Lincoln and of those who sought to brought him to justice. If you paid attention last week, you may recall we loved this book, perhaps the finest non-fiction work 2006 will see. “But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” [...]
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[...] If, like us, you can’t quite get enough of James L. Swanson’s MANHUNT: THE 12-DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN’S KILLER, head to the author’s website. [...]
This book reads like a crime thriller and I REALLY enjoyed it. If all history books were as compelling as this I’d quickly become a history buff. Sadly, most history books are too long and boring and read like textbooks. That’s exactly why I rarely read about history and why I barely passed my required history classes in school. My hat’s off to Swanson for presenting a history lesson that I loved.
[...] Of course, being younger and less – shall we say – experimental, Mary outlived them all. She even had the last laugh, as her creation remains a household name nearly 200 years later. Still, her life was a mostly sad one, and as THE MONSTERS details every reason why, it also brings her the respect she deserved. Through excellent research and an unflinching eye, the Hooblers have crafted what is – just behind MANHUNT – the most enjoyable non-fiction book I’ve read so far this year. –Rod Lott [...]
[...] QUILL YOU PLEASE VOTE? Nominations for the 2nd annual Quills Awards were announced yesterday, honoring the best in books among 20 categories. Well, at least they say “best,” but Tyler Perry is nominated in the humor category for DON’T MAKE A BLACK WOMAN TAKE OFF HER EARRINGS. (Really? Were only five humor titles published last year?) The nominees are all over the board and appear to have been picked randomly, although they did have the good sense to nominate James Swanson’s MANHUNT in two categories, and it remains our favorite non-fiction title of the year (for damn good reasons, hoss). Other titles nominated that we’ve reviewed here include Stephen King’s CELL, Christopher Moore’s A DIRTY JOB and Raymond Khoury’s startlingly mediocre THE LAST TEMPLAR. So go vote now in their laborious one-category-at-a-time process before Sept. 30, at quillsvote.com. The awards ceremony will be televised on NBC stations Oct. 11, to even fewer viewers than the least-watched episode of JOEY. However, if we can get Elizabeth Kostova (a winner for last year’s THE HISTORIAN) to show up in a slightly more revealing dress than she did before, that could change. [...]
[...] Those who wish James L. Swanson’s MANHUNT offered as much detail on the deaths of John Wilkes Booth’s conspirators as it did on Booth himself will find it in LINCOLN’S ASSASSINS: THEIR TRIAL AND EXECUTION. Co-written with Daniel R. Weinberg, ASSASSINS serves as a coffee-table companion to MANHUNT — still the best nonfiction book of the year — but don’t call it a sequel: Originally released in 2001, it’s being brought back to life in the wake of MANHUNT’s success. [...]
[...] Unpatriotic supporters of presidential assassins will get their sick glee from LINCOLN’S ASSASSINS: THEIR TRIAL AND EXECUTION much in the way they giggled over James L. Swanson’s MANHUNT. Rod Lott – pinko-loving hummus-eater that he is — liked having this coffee-table supplement to MANHUNT, but he likes a lot of things real Americans don’t like (such as his unnatural obsession with naked Charo), so you’ve been warned. [...]