Maybe it’s better for a combination of reasons: the subject matter is more gruesome and eerie and fun. This subject is very clearly a labor of love for Sarah Vowell. The voice of Abraham Lincoln is read by Stephen King, whose raspy New Englandness is nothing like you imagine Abraham Lincoln’s folksy midwesterness to sound like, but maybe it works.
Like the other Sarah Voweel audiobooks, this one lives and dies based on who is reading. So this one works better not because she has better people reading: there’s cross-over in the cast and I am not going to suggest that John Slattery is not great, because he is. The difference is that a lot more of the quotations used in this one are more necessary and fleshed out and so the readers have more to work with and the intrusions of different voices don’t come off as jarring. In addition, all assassins are weird narcissistic and bombastic windbags, just like all presidents are, that the combination of the two very different sets of people work.
The biggest issue this book has, both in its own right but also given the political environment of today, is that all of Sarah Vowell’s frustrations with the Bush administration actually seem kind of quaint or even naive based on today. I didn’t want George Bush to win a second term, but I had nothing invested in John Kerry as a possible president. He was a pretty good Secretary of State (funny now that we have a complete nothing in the office now), but now we have that situation where I was heavily invested in the person who lost, and Bush seems downright great in comparison to Trump.
Anyway, I liked it better. But NOW I a DO think I am done for the while.
I detest Trump, and the mockery of Bush 43’s intelligence was misplaced, but let’s not view the past through rose-colored glasses. For all his hideous faults Trump still hasn’t manufactured the evidence to get us into a war which has cost thousands of lives and may never end.
Bush’s true crime wasn’t (I’m convinced) that he manufactured a war. It was that he surrounded himself with some fairly horrendous advisors, cabinet officials, and perhaps the worst VP in US history (whom he granted a great deal of power, given his experience).
The more I read about his administration (including his memoir), this seems to be the most plausible assessment.
I don’t say this to excuse his presidency – but I do think it justifies looking on him more fondly from the perspective of living under a Trump presidency.
In short, I think Bush was well-intentioned, but placed too much trust in too many undeserving people. Trump, on the other hand, is absolutely abhorrent.