Tonight, I finished Killing Lincoln, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. This was a good pop-history account of Lincoln's assassination, but it was modeled way too much on a James Patterson mystery paperback for my taste. It has no references, very little background information, and the Notes section is an informal bibliography (most charitably). I had the hardest time with the insinuations that there was "more to the conspiracy than we know", presented without actually saying what the accusation was, or sourcing the accusation. The notes section mentioned a few "controversial" books, but it never said where the most out-there conspiracy theories came from. It did helpfully note that the source for a lot of the conspiracy theory stuff has been thoroughly discredited by the historical community.
Basically, I thought this book did a good job of telling the story of the assassination, but it's not a useful piece of history writing, and if you'd paid attention in US history class, you'd have heard about 80% of it before.
TL;DR: Good read, but feels like one of those History Channel shows you watch when you're home sick at 2 in the afternoon.
No comments:
Post a Comment