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A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
Doubleday
September 2011
On Sale: September 20, 2011
352 pages ISBN: 0385526261 EAN: 9780385526265 Kindle: B004J4X33O Hardcover / e-Book
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Other Editions Trade Size (reprint - June 2012)
Non-Fiction
James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever
elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to
become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a
renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for
president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle
with the corrupt political establishment. But four months
after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked
Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what
happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in
turmoil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike
shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently
fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as
the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for
power—over his administration, over the nation’s future,
and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians
administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous
effect. As his condition worsened, Garfield received help:
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked
around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding
the bullet. Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with
an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive,
The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil
in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a
classic of narrative history.
AwardsMystery Writers of America, Best Fact Crime, April 2012
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