lightreads

This is a meandering book -- part travelogue, part history, part memoir -- about the first three presidential assassinations (POP QUIZ! Name them in chronological order . . . NOW!). The author tramped all over the northeastern United States finding plaques, visiting ghoulish museum displays, retracing Booth’s escape route through Maryland. The style is conversational but not tacky, wandering but not self-indulgent, funny but not irritating. And how many personal memoirs of history do I say that about? Vowell is an NPR contributor as well as an excellent writer, and her transmedia tendencies do a lot of good things here. The book wanders from Booth’s history to Emma Goldman to a free love commune in New York to Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows, and makes it all relevant. Vowell is also about as far left as, you know, me, and she says some quiet but astute things about patriotism without ever using the word or getting anywhere near the subject. She also says this, which rang a bell in my head:

Yes, Lewis Mumford called it [the Lincoln monument] a “memorial to the Spanish-American War,” and he’s not all wrong. But loving this memorial is a lot like loving this country: I might not have built the place this way, it’s a little too pompous, and if you look underneath the marble the structure’s a fake and ye old Parthenon is actually supported by skyscraper steel. But the Lincoln memorial is still my favorite place in the world, and not just in spite of its stupid flaws. It’s my favorite place partly because of its blankness, because of those columns that are such standard issue western civ clichés they don’t so much exist as float.

Nice reading, simultaneously light and thoughtful.