Killing Lincoln Review

I like history and for how much I claim I like it, I don’t read that many books about history. So I was excited to get this book from my grandma a few months ago. She’s a big Bill O’Reilly fan, I don’t really follow him at all so I feel pretty neutral about him. When the book first starts its really close to Lincoln’s death so I was surprised that there was so much information all within those last days. I think the thing I enjoyed the most was how much he really put you in each person’s mindset. Some of it came from journals and other thoughts were probably just a guess, butI really liked it. I wish my history classes growing up were more about the thoughts and lives of people rather than just names and dates.

I found myself having to switch back to the chapter headings, which tell you the date and time of day, to remember where I was in the story. By the way each chapter is really short too, which I wasn’t the biggest fan of, but it makes sense of why they did it that way. I think the thing I loved most was reading how John Wilkes Booth really believed what he was doing was the right thing and how famous he desired to be. He got one thing right, everyone knows his name, but not for the reason he wished. 

Since these chapters were so short, I found myself not picking up the book that often. It really took me almost the entire month to read. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked the book, but I wasn’t thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it. Now that I’ve finished it though, I do want to watch a few documentaries and movies about Lincoln. 

This was a book that reminded me of why I only chose to read one a month and just add in-betweeners when i fish early. If I had scheduled two this month I would have fallen behind. It’s kind of weird because this review probably makes it seem like I didn’t like it, but I did, I swear! I would recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about Lincoln’s final days, even though there was a little bit of inaccuracies. See the thing is yes, there were some things that were not totally true, but this book was entertaining as heck and I learned a lot more than I would have listening to a lecture. 

So tell me, what did you think?