James Garfield

One of the best books I've read all year.  Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic, a book about the assassination of President James Garfield.  Here's a sentence no one has ever written before: I am a big James Garfield fan.  I ghost-wrote a book chapter about his assassination back in law school, and did a bunch of reading in order to do that... and discovered that Garfield was a pretty brilliant guy, who might have been a terrific President had he not been shot by a crazy person pretty soon after he took office.  Millard read everything I read, and about ten times more, and has used all of that research to put together a highly compelling, highly readable book.  The medical storyline -- Garfield would almost certainly have lived if he'd been shot in Europe, where Joseph Lister's ideas about keeping wounds clean and sanitizing medical instruments had taken hold in a way they simply hadn't yet in the U.S., and had the doctors simply not inserted their dirty fingers into the bullet hole, repeatedly, he would have been fine -- is probably the most interesting of all, but the entire book is really quite excellent.  I highly recommend it.