Having made the commercially courageous decision to avoid the catnip that is the Kennedy name, Vowell restricts her gaze to America's first three presidential murders: those of Abraham Lincoln, Garfield and William McKinley. 'Assassination Vacation' revels in such small epiphanies. To what evidentiary purpose Garfield's spine ended up in jurors' hands, Vowell does not say - even in death, most politicians would be mortified to have their backbones examined - but the incident does serve as proof that when it comes to ghoulishness, you'll rarely outdo the 19th century, and this despite its lack of 24-hour cable news networks and their attendant programming needs. One day, for instance, the world learned he had had a 'free discharge of healthy-looking pus.' And after he finally left this mortal coil, the poor man suffered one last invasion of privacy: his spine, removed during autopsy, was passed around to jurors during the trial of his assassin, a delusional man who had been haunting the White House and the State Department in hopes of being named ambassador to France.

Crowds gathered at newspaper and telegraph offices to await the icky medical bulletins emanating from what turned out to be Garfield's deathbed. Bush-like), he lingered on for two and a half months before finally succumbing, and that during this protracted farewell, the citizenry was just as riveted by the president's fluctuating condition as we would be today. Garfield was shot in the back on J(the 20th president was boarding a train in Washington, bound for a New England vacation after only four months in office - how George W. Vowell, a journalist and essayist in the McSweeney's orbit, reminds us that after James A. Then I read Sarah Vowell's 'Assassination Vacation,' a learned, engagingly discursive, funny, sometimes even jolly ramble - literally - through the landscape of American presidential assassinations. But for the dying, this gruesome play-by-play seemed a horrible violation, and also a uniquely contemporary one - yet another symptom of a culture with serious boundary issues. Terri Schiavo has just received a morphine suppository! The Pope is being fed through his nose! I don't mean to sound lofty or scornful I was glued to the tube, too. The occasion was the protracted, nearly concurrent death watches for Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II, during which the news media felt compelled to highlight every detail of physical decay, no matter how intimate.

Not long ago, I made the mistake of thinking there was something new-ish under the sun.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell