Nonfiction Review: Destiny of the Republic

Book By Book

My neighborhood book group met last week to discuss Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard. I’ve mostly been reading fiction for the R.I.P. Challenge, but with that subtitle, this nonfiction book fit the darker themes of the challenge! We all very much enjoyed the book and had a lively discussion.

Most people, myself included, know very little about the 20th president of the United State, James A. Garfield, because he was only president for six months in 1881 and spent the last two of that bed-ridden. Here, the author provides a dual narrative, of both the president and his assassin, along with some fascinating history about medicine and inventions of the time. Garfield was a remarkable man who was born into poverty but went on to become well-educated and work in academia. He graduated from law school, worked as an attorney, and was a major general in the Union Army during the Civil War. Afterward, he represented Ohio in Congress, though he had no intention of running for president until a unanimous vote at the Republican National Convention made him their nominee. Meanwhile, a man named Charles Guiteau was becoming more and more delusional, thinking that he was an important, powerful man who helped get Garfield elected and then getting angry when he wasn’t appointed ambassador to France. Madness is definitely the right term for this man who eventually shot Garfield in the back in a Washington train station. Garfield didn’t die of the shot, though. He died of horrible infection after a power-hungry, ignorant doctor insisted he be the president’s sole caregiver. Alexander Graham Bell even got involved in trying to save the president’s life, but Garfield died in September, leaving Chester A. Arthur as the new president.

I knew absolutely nothing about Garfield when I started this book and not only learned a lot but was gripped by the story right from the start. The author weaves together the dual narratives of Garfield and Guiteau, including their early lives, Garfield’s rise to the presidency, and some of the key turning points that fed Guiteau’s delusions. I was especially riveted by the account of the Republican National Convention in 1880: it took hundreds of votes to come to consensus and ultimately, Garfield was nominated in spite of insisting he didn’t want to be (two things that would never happen today!). Along the way, the author also provides fascinating historical details about inventors of the day, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and Dr. Joseph Lister, who first applied Germ Theory to medicine and discovered ways to prevent infection during and after surgery. All of these various threads eventually come together in a perfect storm that doomed Garfield. I listened to this book, and the audio production was excellent, pulling me right into the story from the first chapter. My book group gave this book an average rating of 8 out of 10, so it was a hit with almost everyone. For another engrossing historical story from Millard, our group also enjoyed River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. 

368 pages, Doubleday

This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

Nonfiction Reader Challenge – History category

Literary Escapes Challenge – District of Columbia

R.I.P. Challenge

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