3 October 2008 - 22:10Assassination Vacation

Sarah Vowell is an author, radio commentator (featured on This American Life), and an obsessed history buff.  She plans vacations around historic sites and national parks.  In the book Assassination Vacation, she explores the first three presidential assassinations in our nation’s history.  To do this, she visits any site even vaguely related to the event at hand, such as the place in the Adirondacks where Teddy Roosevelt was vacationing when he received the news of McKinley’s death or the spot where John Wilkes Booth died in Virginia while on the run for the murder of Abraham Lincoln.  And she has an uncanny sense of the irony of even the littlest detail:

“Which brings me to the creepiest thing about Booth’s death spot–the sign.  The signs were erected by the state of Virginia.  Logically, they bear the state’s official seal.  And that seal of course features the state motto, inscribed in Latin: Sic semper tyrannis.   It is unfair of me to say so,but the slogan Booth shouted from the state of Ford’s Theatre, the over-blown, self-important pseudo-Shakespearean blather, being etched on the sign marking his death feels like the stamp of approval.”

Vowell drags friends and relatives along with her on some of these outings, mainly because some locations aren’t near public transportation, and she doesn’t like to drive. And though they do not share her appreciation of the minor historical sites that she feels she must see, her friends do add a bit of comic relief to her devotion to history.  One of them brings up the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where any actor in any movie can be connected to Bacon in six degrees or less.

“Assassinations are your Kevin Bacon.  No matter what we’re talking about, you will always bring the conversation back to a president getting shot.”

Did I say she was funny, too?  I love her dry sense of humor, and deadpan delivery.

“Once I knew my dead presidents and I had become insufferable, I started to censor myself.  There were a lot of get-togethers with friends where I didn’t hear half of what was being said because I was sitting there, silently chiding myself, Don’t bring up McKinley.  Don’t bring up McKinley.”

In addition, Vowell makes a lot of connections to current events (e.g. comparing the Spanish-American War to our involvement in Iraq).  Somehow she has managed to pull together three separate historical events into a cohesive whole.  Her narrative style is engaging, with welcome and interesting digressions of commentary and humorous observations, making this is an entertaining and informative book.