So, I’ve finished Sarah Vowell‘s Assassination Vacation, in which she explores the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. She describes it as a pilgrimage–the places they died, the places they were shot, the places their assassins died. While the book was primarily concerned with exploring facts, crafting a cohesive narrative for the assassination attempts that is interesting and readable, while still demonstrating the amount of research that went into the creation of the book.

What interested me most, however, is the underlying narrative of decline. The country in which Lincoln died is not the country in which McKinley was assassinated. America fell into imperialism. There’s a wistfulness there–a love for the country as it is but a longing to have it return to what it was.

It’s a very human story, highly accessible–to myself as a historical dilettante, and I imagine to others with varying degrees of interest. Though the book is about assassinations, it’s not a book of facts. It’s a book of stories. There are too few books that are willing to tell a story, and Sarah Vowell has a unique story to tell.