Maybe it’s better for a combination of reasons: the subject matter is more gruesome and eerie and fun. This subject is very clearly a labor of love for Sarah Vowell. The voice of Abraham Lincoln is read by Stephen King, whose raspy New Englandness is nothing like you imagine Abraham Lincoln’s folksy midwesterness to sound like, but maybe it works. Like the other Sarah Voweel audiobooks, this one lives and dies based on who is reading. So this one works better not because she has […]
Assassination Vacation (literally! I listened to this on vacation)
So I took 2 months off of reviewing. The BE clan decided to travel all over the country and world so there was hardly any time to update my reading spreadsheet, let alone write a review. But we’re back and finally all healthy so moments of free time are now available! Welcome to catch-up. And let’s start with an adorable history book about presidential assassinations! In Sarah Vowell’s vein of quirky, off kilter history books this one talks about the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, […]
Another politically charged road trip
I know Sarah Vowell from her numerous appearances on the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; after various reviews of Vowell’s work, many in the last month, I figured I’d give her a shot. “History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.” It took me a while to get interested in this one. I think my primary problem was leading with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. In history class you hear about Lincoln and Kennedy’s assassinations ad naseum; while […]
Lincoln was late to his own assassination.
There’s something about the way Sarah Vowell writes about history that brings it to life for me. Probably because there’s something about the way that Sarah Vowell writes about people, and history is made of people. It often doesn’t feel that way. (Ironically, there’s a section in here where she tells a story about a time where she ended up yelling at some guy in a supermarket about how the only time it would be interesting to live through history would be if you were […]