Product Description

Geary turns his attention to the most famous assassination of the Victorian era, that of President Lincoln. The details he reveals are fascinating. Booth worked with a group of disgruntled Southern sympathizers out to decapitate much of the US Executive branch, not just the President! Geary also details the flight of the culprits and the hot pursuit of federal agents.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #348923 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This latest volume of Geary's series A Treasury of Victorian Murder is a must-read for those who are only familiar with cursory details of Lincoln's assassination. Geary's meticulous research and vivid illustrations create a fascinating narrative that covers the 62 days between March 4 and May 4, 1865, and provide a wealth of information on murderous thespian and Southern loyalist John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators, some of whom backed out of the assassination plot. Geary paints Booth as a man with an exorbitant need for attention and aggrandizement. History shows he achieved the attention he sought, but rather than being hailed as a hero to the South, Booth found himself regarded as an utter villain by those whose favor he hoped to garner. Geary also gives much attention to the bizarre elements of the case, such as Lincoln's ominous dreams of his own death, the strange actions of Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton and the shockingly lax security around the president, all the more alarming when coupled with obvious hints beforehand that something foul was afoot in the capital. With his elegant pen-and-ink art and knack for sifting memorable and unusual details from history, Geary renders this familiar true story in riveting and thorough detail.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up–This book will have even reluctant readers immersed in history. It covers Lincoln's assassination, the events that led up to it, and the aftermath. Geary also makes a point of bringing up still-unanswered questions, like the whereabouts of the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's journal. Readers will learn many unusual facts, including why the Grants might have declined the Lincolns' invitation to Ford's Theatre and how Booth's body was identified after his death by the initials he had carved into his right hand. Many of the black-and-white drawings are very striking, some filling all or most of a page. Notable images include those of Lincoln's prophetic dream about being assassinated, the removal of Lincoln's brain dislodging the flattened bullet, and Booth being shot while the tobacco barn burned around him. This last image is one of the few instances of fictionalizing (we can't know what Booth looked like at that moment since we don't even know who shot him), but otherwise this is as factual as any book a student would use for research. Readers who were fascinated by the engrossing story of Booth and his family in James Cross Giblin's Good Brother, Bad Brother (Clarion, 2005) will enjoy this graphic novel, but even teens who know nothing about the tragedy will find their heads chock-full of information when they're finished reading this book.–Andrea Lipinski, New York Public Library
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Geary's Treasury of Victorian Murder series arrives at its period's most notorious American homicide and dispels fears that its version couldn't measure up to previous accounts of the crime. Covering the period March 4-July 7, 1865 (Lincoln's second inauguration to the execution of Booth's four condemned coconspirators), Geary limns, in his trademark style recalling nineteenth-century newspaper engravings, the many figures directly affected by the assassination, expanding upon the most important. The latter include, besides victim and killer, Mrs. Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, failed assassin (of Secretary of State Seward) Lewis Powell, and coconspirator David Herold (who fled with Booth). As in previous Treasury volumes, the killer is the predominant protagonist, and Geary's Booth is as frightening and pathetic as any all-prose chronicler has made him. The maps and cutaway floor plans (with characters in place) that Geary provides make perhaps the most powerful impact of any panels in an impressive rendering, for they facilitate imagining nineteenth-century interior space. Another honorable entry in a fascinating series. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

"Popular" history as it ought to be done
This is the seventh in a very high-quality series that includes Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, H. H. Holmes, and Charles Guiteau. Think of it as "Classics Illustrated" for adults. Geary's black-and-white crow-quill drawing style fits perfectly his carefully narrated history of the sixty-two days between Lincoln's second Inauguration and his entombment in Springfield, by way of the assassination plot, the unsuccessful attacks on Johnson and Seward, Booth's convenient escape, and his death in Garrett's tobacco barn. I've long thought there was more there than meets the eye, with the focus on the peculiar actions of Stanton, both before and after Ford's Theater, and the author mentions those points in passing, but he sticks pretty close to the official train of events. An excellent piece of work.

another winner
Once again, Geary takes a complicated crime and presents it in an understandable -- and very enjoyable & redable -- level.