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Title details for Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard - Available

Destiny of the Republic

A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

by Candice Millard
Paul Michael
Audiobook
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James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back.
But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his con­dition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet.
Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    September 20, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307939685
      • File size: 282056 KB
      • Duration: 09:47:36

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Paul Michael effectively maintains the thread of a narrative history that is by nature digressive. Candice Millard's excellent account of the 1881 shooting of President James Garfield, barely three months into his presidency, details what is generally a footnote in American history. But Garfield's murder was also the intersection of a number of emerging social and technological forces and is one of American history's great what-if's. Narrator Michael brings a steady tone to a text that has license to roam the tangled history of Reconstruction, the Chicago fire, and the career of Alexander Graham Bell. In its hardcover reviews this novel was criticized for being uneven and disproportionate. Those qualities vanish here, and Michael's empathetic delivery finds a steady course for Millard's many-channeled story. D.A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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