More on the Lincoln book...

Good heavens, its late at night....  I got to reading this Killing Lincoln book and lost all track of time.....  I'm to the point where Lincoln has just been shot and Booth has ridden off into the night on a fast horse...

The story is told like you are reading a novel...  As though it was a here and now depiction of the events....  I'm sure that some of it has to be conjecture as what each man was feeling and thinking would have to be...  But it is as though you are right along side of Lincoln and Booth as the scene unfolds...

This book is written by Martin Dugard, who has some experience in writing history and does a good job of it in the present tense...  And as a celebrity author, Bill O'Reilly  lends his name as well...   O'Reilly has the advantage of being a history teacher from high school, so his abilities in the matter are also worthy...  He has a graduate degree from Harvard..

There seems to be no political agenda or bias one way or the other in the telling of the story....  The opinions expressed are only those of the people that are the central players of the story in 1865...

I did read that some of the facts behind the story are not exactly correct, and that the people at present day Ford's Theater wouldn't sell the book... But I wonder if that isn't politically motivated...  The facts in error were dates of a fire in Ford's Theater and the president's office being called the oval office which would be wrong because the actual oval office was built in 1909..

So far I haven't found any reference to the oval office in this edition, so I wonder if that hasn't been subsequently corrected....

Anyway not much else has happened around here today as we just watched the TV and made a few meals...  Loyce of course works on her quilt projects and is totally happy at that...

The motorcycle stayed parked even though it was a sunny and bright 73 degree day.....

I really didn't get started reading the book until later in the evening, but it is hard to put down once you start on it....

There have been over a million copies of this book sold, and to the extent that it teaches the history of events surrounding this period in time, it should be a positive thing...

Oh, and a commenter made reference to not wanting O'Reilly to make any more money from him on the book...  But I do think that O'Reilly has stated that profits from his books all go to charity... And on his web site, he goes into extensive explanation of which charities those are....  O'Reilly Charities

I agree that O'Reilly can be a rather polarizing news commentator, but none of that positioning seems to be present in anything I have read in this book so far...  Perhaps there will be some castigating at the end.......

Retired Rod