Review: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

I hate politics.  I look at hard-core liberals and conservatives with the same regard as I do all those who wake up in the morning and start figuring out how to squeeze, bend and shove this chaotic and anarchistic world into the shape required by their ideologies. I never reveal who I vote for and I do not discuss politics on anything less than by a decade-by-decade perspective.

Which is part of my whole problem.  Politics seems to require a deliberate short sightedness, an emphasis on the immediate problems of today while ignoring the (admittedly safer and less controversial) bird's eye-view of history's currents and jet streams.  Which is why I struggled through the first half of Sarah Vowell's unusual travelogue, Assassination Vacation.

The book starts with an interesting premise: Ms. Vowell's pilgrimage to places and objects associated with the first three US presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.  Distracting from this otherwise endearing adventure in the tourism of political murder, are the author's frequent asides, referring to the political situation of at the time of publication.  At least for me, reading G. W. Bush jokes in 2010 is about as funny as watching reruns of Saturday Night Live cracking on Jimmy Carter.


About half the book deals with Lincoln's assassination, which is to be expected, but unless you are as dedicated a Lincolnophile as Ms. Vowell, there is almost certain to be some new historical anecdote or connection here to discover.

Far more interesting are the lesser known characters associated with Presidents Garfield and McKinley, especially as these two fallen leaders have been nearly forgotten by history.  The former is probably my favorite section of the book, if only because the assassination of Garfield is so misunderstood in American history textbooks.  Vowell brings to life the principal characters, as well as the power brokers, religious dissidents and lunatic fringe of the Gilded Age.

The McKinley chapter finds Ms. Vowell once again turning up the political volume.  Although her argument that Afghanistan and Iraq have parallels to the Spanish-American War should help disabuse one of the idea that we live in extraordinary and unique times, she still seems reluctant to apply the same sense of balanced, moral ambiguity uniformly across time and space.  More polemic, than history.

Ms. Vowell has a tremendous ability to bring her historical narratives to life, weaving them in and out of descriptions of her travels.  The prose is also wonderfully light and pithy, with metaphors and pop culture references that will make the Gen X among us grin and (sometimes) laugh out loud.  Which is why her partisan jabs stick out so uncomfortably in the midst of an otherwise light and accessible essayist style.
 
If you are looking for the sort of objective history in which the historian sits apart and above the subject matter, this ain't it.   If you're the kind of person who gets fired up watching MSNBC or Fox News, you will probably get fired up reading this book.  The author's political beliefs and biases are neither concealed nor subtle.  But then again, she never pretends they are.  In as much as an essayist should be as true to herself as possible, Sarah Vowell certainly writes with her own unique personality, neuroses and politics.