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The President And The Assassin: McKinley, Terror, And Empire At The Dawn Of The American Century (2011)

by Scott Miller(Favorite Author)

3.87 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1400067529 (ISBN13: 9781400067527)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Random House

review 1: Terrorists lurk inside the country. They publish venom toward the whole system. Bombings demonstrate they’re capable of what they threaten. But it’s not present day. It’s 1901. The nation just re-elected by a landslide a beloved Republican president credited with pulling the country out of recession with tariffs and pro-business policies and vaulting it into the first rank of world powers by defeating Spain and the Boxer rebels in China. Then, while he attended a magnificent display of American know-how at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, one of the terrorists shot him. By the time the shot fires, Scott Miller has taken you so painstakingly through the tides of events that McKinley’s assassination seems almost inevitable. Turns out, Leon Czolgosz, a... more scruffy layabout with long-simmering anarchist dreams, heard Emma Goldman speak. Yes, the famous radical and free love advocate, whose former boyfriend shot Henry Clay Frick, the railroad financier. Czolgosz was smitten with Goldman and inspired by her speech to kill the president. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. An excellent read, this renders the labor movement, anarchists, world trade and empire politics, and most of all McKinley himself, familiar.
review 2: I listened to this on audiobook on a couple of recent trips to Augusta, GA and Knoxville, TN. The narrative was easily to listen to and it provided a great distraction for severe traffic backups on the Interstate. I liked how the stories were interwoven together to reach a climactic clash between McKinley and Czolgosz. The storytelling was mostly accurate. I have heard conflicting reports regarding Mrs. McKinley's life after the White House. The social and political forces that were going on in the United States in last part of the nineteenth century are described in good narrative detail and I would recommend it to others. less

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