When my sister Amy and I were in Florida taking my nephew Owen to Disney World, we made a side trip to the Geneva Cemetery. Atzerodt chickened out, and though Powell badly wounded Seward, he survived. The idea was to leave the government in chaos and hopefully lead to its meltdown. Booth would head to Ford’s Theater (the original collapsed in 1893, but the National Parks Service restored it in 1968), George Atzerodt was to murder Vice President Johnson, and Lewis Powell would go after Secretary of State Seward (he who purchased Alaska on behalf of the US). We remember from history class that John Wilkes Booth was the man who shot Lincoln, but it was one of three assassination plots to be carried out that night in 1865. Lincoln is her favorite president – she finds him “logical but warm, pragmatic but not without frippery, grand and human all at once” – and his assassination tale takes up more room in the book.

She enlists her sister and other friends to drive her around, as she does not have a license, so that she can trace the path of both President and assassin, and naturally spends a lot of time in Washington, DC. The assassins and the presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are? Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up out of the desert by the sheer will of true believers. Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that way. The egomania required to be president or presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts. These are people who have the gall to believe they can fix us – us and our deficit, our fossil fuels, our racism, poverty, our potholes and public schools. I am only slightly less astonished by the egotism of the assassins, the inflated self-esteem it requires to kill a president than I am astonished by the men who run for president. She gives just as much time to the assassins as she does the Presidents themselves, managing to fully flesh out the half-remembered stories we know with her humor and insight. In Assassination Vacation, she turns her attention to three of the Presidents killed while still in office – Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Saying that it is the closest thing she has to religion, she gleefully travels the country in search of oddball museums, historical burial sites, and every unnoticed plaque. – Vowell remains interested in writing about American history. While Orlean tends to bounce around topics – orchids, Rin Tin Tin, bullfighters, etc. Like Susan Orlean, Sarah Vowell tends to write about subjects that, at first glance, don’t seem all that interesting to the layperson or to one not already obsessed.

Assassination vacation