Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B005O5HY8C | Format: PDF, EPUB
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James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back.
But the shot didn't kill Garfield. The drama of what hapàpened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turàmoil. The unhinged assassin's half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power - over his administration, over the nation's future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his conàdition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet.
Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history.
From the Hardcover edition.
Direct download links available for Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 9 hours and 47 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 20, 2011
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005O5HY8C
James Garfield is most often remembered, if at all, as the president who was assassinated shortly after taking office. Destiny of the Republic brings the dead president back to life. This is not, however, a biography of Garfield. Rather, it is a stirring account of American life and politics during the time of the Garfield presidency, not long after the conclusion of the Civil War, and of a presidential murder. Garfield's early years are sketched out in cursory fashion, his (sometimes troubled) relationship with and eventual devotion to his wife Lucretia is covered in only a few pages, and the death of his youngest child receives little more than a mention. Rather than focusing on Garfield's personal life, Candice Millard devotes her attention to political divisions within the Republican Party (particularly Garfield's battles with New York Senator Roscoe Conkling and the vice president he controlled), as well as Garfield's frustration with the obligations of the office that he had little desire to hold.
The president's assassin is given nearly as much attention as the president. There are times when the book has the feel of a thriller, as the ominous Charles Guiteau weaves in and out of the text, inching himself closer to the president. Millard depicts Guiteau as a con man with delusions of grandeur whose madness was characterized by a growing belief that his plan to assassinate Garfield was divinely inspired.
The assassination occurs at the book's midway point. Millard then treats us to a different kind of political battle, a medical drama about doctors who vie for the opportunity to treat the president and who, ironically, become responsible for his death.
Having recently enjoyed the quirky Matthew Algeo book about Grover Cleveland, The President Is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth, I was ready to tackle another 19th century president.
Destiny of the Republic, which is a phrase from a nominating speech James A. Garfield gave at the Republican convention of 1880, is a fine bit of flowery oratory, but as a book title, I find it completely forgettable. "Decline of the Nation? Debacle of the Century? No, but it's something similar..."
Aside from the dull title, the book is a corker. In the first scene we find our hero, Congressman Garfield, at the Centennial Exposition in Pennsylvania in 1876. He strides along, taking in the displays, while other attendees pay to be pushed in wheelchairs. It seems the spectacle of agile people hopping in and out of their rental rascal scooters at the State Fair that I just visited is part of a long American tradition.
This is not a traditional presidential biography. Instead, Candice Millard has focused the book on the attempted assassination of Garfield and the excruciating two months that followed his shooting.
Millard describes Garfield's rise from poor childhood to academic to state representative to president. On separate but converging paths to Garfield's story are the narratives of Charles Guiteau, the unhinged man who shot Garfield, and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was feverishly working on a kind of x-ray/metal detector that everyone hoped would save the president's life.
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