Book: Assassination Vacation

Overview
Sarah Vowell sets out as an oddball guide through a peculiar American pilgrimage, pairing a road-trip travelogue with lively historical inquiry into three presidential assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley. She moves between archival research, visits to museums and shrines, and wry personal asides, knitting together scenes of violence, grief, and political theater. The narrative treats assassination as a window onto how Americans remember leaders, cope with public trauma, and construct national identity.

Focus and Approach
The narrative concentrates on the killers, John Wilkes Booth, Charles J. Guiteau, and Leon Czolgosz, but never reduces them to caricatures. Vowell explores their motives, backgrounds, and the cultural currents that shaped them: the performative politics of Booth's theatrical world, Guiteau's delusions and the patronage culture of the Gilded Age, and Czolgosz's radicalism amid industrial inequality and anarchist agitation. Rather than strictly chronological biography, the book stitches historical vignettes to contemporary observations, examining the sites where events unfolded and the kitschy, solemn, or commercial ways those sites are remembered.

Style and Voice
Vowell's voice is conversational, witty, and irreverent, moving from sardonic humor to genuine melancholy with quick shifts in tone. She writes in the first person, often placing herself awkwardly at shrines, reenactments, and obscure museums, which allows a personal, sometimes self-deprecating perspective on American memory culture. Pop-culture references and anachronistic asides pervade the prose, keeping dense historical detail lively and accessible without sacrificing scholarly curiosity.

Major Episodes and Scenes
The book visits Ford's Theatre and the boardinghouse in Virginia where Booth was cornered, the dingy spaces associated with Guiteau's act of violence and the long, painful medical care that followed Garfield's shooting, and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo where McKinley fell. Vowell lingers over the public spectacles that followed each assassination: the theatricality of funeral processions, the commodification of relics, and the emergence of museums that alternately sanctify and sensationalize death. She pays attention to small facts and curiosities, embalming practices, souvenir trade, and the oddities of local memorials, that reveal broader cultural patterns.

Themes and Critique
Central themes include the intersection of celebrity and politics, the often inadequate or performative responses of institutions to violence, and the American penchant for mythmaking. Vowell questions how commemoration can obscure historical complexity, showing how simplified narratives make room for heroes and villains while eliding systemic causes of violence. She also wrestles with the ways public mourning becomes a stage for national unity, sometimes at the cost of honest reckoning about political tensions and social inequities.

Legacy and Impact
The book refracts history through a contemporary lens, arguing that the stories Americans tell about presidential death reveal as much about present anxieties as about the past. Vowell's account resists solemnity without being flippant, offering a human-scaled history that invites readers to consider how places, objects, and rituals shape collective memory. The mix of humor, meticulous research, and travelogue makes the book both an entertaining read and a probing meditation on how violence and leadership have been entwined in American life.