Review - Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

In 2006 I read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  The last part of the book detailed the assassination plot on Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson.  Up to that point I knew nothing about Lincoln's murder, other than the name John Wilkes Booth.  Goodwin's description of the event was very intriguing and I wanted to find a book that would tell the whole story.  It wasn't long after that, that I saw Manhunt by James L. Swanson.

From reading Team of Rivals, I had pretty high expectations and Swanson delivered.  Swanson takes the reader from the beginnings of the plan, which was actually hatched the same day of the murder.  It was really an adaptation of previous plans where the opportunities had been limited to actually perform.  For the 12-24 ours immediately after the assassination, Swanson maintains touch with the events surrounding Lincoln & his associates and Booth & Herold (an accomplice).  Telling the story this way keeps things moving and provides the reader with a strong sense of the events.

Swanson puts a lot of effort in detailing the remaining 11 days of Booth's run from the law and provides great detail, though some of it seems to accentuated from his personal assumptions rather than on actual data.  For the most part this is forgivable, because it keeps the story going and the emotions are generally easy to intuit to the situation.

The story telling is fabulous.  It did take me a week and half to complete the book; I think normally I could have it read within a week.  It was definitely a book I relished returning to read, but really disappointed I waited as long as I did before I read it.

I only have two main issues with the book.  First, a timeline of some sort should have been included in the book.  I know the assassination took place on Good Friday 4/14/1865, but I found it easy to get lost as far as how far into the chase some event were.  It wasn't horrible, but I would have like a timeline that I could refer to quickly.  Swanson did provide a map at the beginning of the book, which I referred to often to get my bearings.  A time line would have done the same.

My other issue is the title.  It's called Manhunt: The 12-day Chase for Lincoln's Killer.  In a lot of ways the book seemed like it should have been titled Escape: Booth's 12 days on the Run.  I know it's a bit nit-picky, but I prefer accurate titles.  I think considering the title, Swanson could have spent some more time with the manhunters.  The book was truly from Booth's perspective, which was still enjoyable.  I'd be interested in some of the other stories of people looking for Booth.

Ultimately, I think the book is still strong storytelling and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It's definitely a book I would recommend to people interested in Lincoln, Civil War era history, or just history in general.

Wiki-Security?

What the (insert expletive)?  So I was working on a post for the site here and all of a sudden this webpage popped up called antispywaremaster.  I admit to being slightly confused at first; my initial thought was that my Mac wanted to run an anti-spyware program.  That thought last .5 seconds, because it was just weird.  I immediately tried closing all my windows, which wasn't.  My main goal was to make sure whatever I did didn't let this thing download anything to my computer.

I'm not sure if it worked.  Once I recovered, I started looking this spyware up online, just to see what was out there.  A webpage came up that seemed to have info on it.  The page was from a site called Wiki-Security.  It looks like a wikipedia for web security.  I'm very suspicious of the website.  They offered a free download for this anti-antispywaremaster program.  That immediately caught my attention.  I then did a Google search for Wiki-Security, and the site doesn't even come up until the second page of results.  Not only that, but the page I found was for some other virus called Antivirus 2008.  The wording for the entry is almost word for word the same for their anti-antispywaremaster program.  It's possible that this is a legit site, but right now I'm suspicious; I couldn't even get an entry for the site on wikipedia.

I still have some more research to do, but I thought I'd pass that on.  (I should finish the original post I was working on tomorrow.)

Neil deGrasse Tyson the Racist

Some of you have probably heard about the scuffle in the Dallas area.  A member or the city council made the mistake of referring to the traffic ticket collection office as a black hole.  Apparently a lot of paperwork was getting lost.  Two black officials took offense to the term, one even calling it a white hole.  Well, maybe these folks need to go back to 5th grade science.  A white hole is actually a scientific term for a theoretical object where objects are ejected, rather than sucked in at the event horizon.

Julia Gorin has a pretty good article on this topic in the Christian Science Monitor.  The article points out some of the uses of the word black in positive contexts vs. some uses of the word white in negative contexts.

What does this have to do with Neil deGrasse Tyson?  Apparently he is unaware of the racist-ness of the term black hole, because he named one of his books Death by Black Hole.  He was such a brilliant man with a great show on PBS.  As soon as the two Dallas Mensa applicants find out about good old Neil, he'll have to move see if he can salvage his reputation enough to cohost with Don Imus.  Maybe that will teach him a valuable lesson.

This was old news, but worth mentioning.  I actually started this post over a week ago, but circumstances made it so that I could not finish.  Pretty lame, since it turned out to be so short.

Good luck Neil.

I reserve the Right....

Before this gets too far, I must add that I may talk about things other than books.  There's just too much in the news to leave it all alone.  Ultimately this blog will focus on stuff i read and from various sources and I'll throw in what ever links I think are appropriate.

The Blog

I've decided to finally start a blog.  I racked my brain for many moons as what should be the focus of my blog.  Since I read a book every week to week and half, I decided that would be a good place to start.  I tend to read a book and then move on to the next title, though I often give a brief synopsis to my siblings on our Yahoo group.  That's been fun, but I figured I would get more out of the books if I tried to write a semi-formal review.  I see it as an opportunity to reinforce what I read to support retention.

I must confess, that most of the books will mostly get fairly positive reviews.  I tend  to know what to expect from a book before I pick it up, so I'm rarely disappointed in that way.  The question will be whether the book supports itself.  This will be a work in process, so hopefully improvement will be noticeable.  I'm always on the hunt for new books to add to my list, so suggestions are welcome.

I keep a special book list that tracks what I have read and how many pages, back to 2005, and has the books that I plan to read.  I put  lot of time into it, it has about 300 on the list at the moment with the catalog numbers for the library.  I enter and leave the library within 10 minutes with up to 5-6 books while wrangling a three year-old and 10 month-old.  I think that's pretty good.  I will post my list as soon as I figure out how to.