If you were asked to name every president who was assassinated, would you remember James Garfield? He was president for only a matter of months, part of a generally undistinguished cohort that served between Grant and McKinley. There is no great legislation that we credit to Garfield, no famous speeches or charismatic wife. On the surface, Garfield was nothing more than a generally decent man, a loving father, a good husband–an ineffectual president, although to be fair he spent a third of his term in office dying of a […]
Wall to wall tragedy, with nary a lasagna to be found.
Apart from The Emperor and the Assassin, this is a different beast from the other biographies I’ve been reading. Dispensing with the straight telling of James Garfield’s life, Candice Millard instead paints the portrait of an era. Taking place between the war that sundered the nation and the dawn of the new century, the era in which Garfield rose to prominence was nothing if not propitious. It was a time for momentous change and novel invention. The light bulb and the telephone came to prominence. […]