Millard recounts this episode of our nation’s history in a style that keeps readers on the edge of their seats even though the ending is known. Millard concludes it “became immediately, and painfully apparent that, far from preventing or even delaying the president’s death, the doctors very likely caused it.” This tale of physician error contextualized by politics and murder makes for riveting reading. Bell wasn’t able to find the bullet, however, because Bliss only allowed him to look for it on the right side of Garfield’s body.

Willard Bliss consulted with Bell who had invented an instrument called the induction balance, a metal detection device that once it found metal would send a sound to a telephone receiver attached to it. In frustration, Garfield’s lead physician D. Millard argues, they made matters wore by using unsanitary equipment and ignoring the then-new discoveries about antiseptic surgery by British physician Joseph Lister. Physicians sought to remove the bullet, though in the pre X-ray era had difficulty locating its exact whereabouts. One of the bullets struck his back, broke two of his ribs and grazed an artery, but didn’t hit his spinal cord. Garfield was sworn in on Maand on July 2 was shot while waiting to board a train in Washington by Guiteau, a crazed patronage seeker. Millard’s political history is solid, it’s not her main focus in this book and those looking for a first-rate political biography of Garfield should read Ken Ackerman’s “Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of James A. He beat out, among others, former President Ulysses S. However, he was such a compelling orator and appealing candidate that he was nominated as the compromise choice. At the time, he was a congressman and gave the presidential nominating speech for Ohio Republican Sen. Garfield, one of a series of relatively unmemorable presidents who served in the late 1800s between Lincoln and Roosevelt, was an unlikely winner of the GOP nod for the nation’s top job in 1880. Roosevelt (who described that trip, taken when he was 55, as “my last chance to be a boy”) is a more colorful and historically significant subject than Garfield, but there are enough twists and turns in this rendition of Garfield’s life to hold a reader’s interest. Those who read her masterful account of Theodore Roosevelt’s post-presidential trip down the Amazon, “River of Doubt,” will be pleased to find more of her research and narrative prowess in this volume. Millard deftly blends the stories of Garfield and Bell and assassin Charles Guiteau and makes readers feel as if they were witnesses to the key events.

In the best tradition of the great writers of narrative nonfiction, Ms.

Destiny of the republic book review