If you haven’t gotten to it already, Save Jerseyans, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed American Forever, written by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Duggard, is an exciting if somewhat downbeat historical fiction spanning the final 14 days prior to President Lincoln’s assassination.
The book is divided into four major parts and filled with well-written and descriptive battle scenes that not only tell the tale of some of the war’s major battles and events, but also attempts to get into the minds of some of the period’s best known personalities. From Grant to Lee and Lincoln to Booth, readers are exposed to the full range of emotions, thoughts, and strategies that these men, for ill or gain, may have experienced.
Written in the present tense, the book draws you in and leads you to rethink motivating forces behind these characters and the nation as a whole at the most transformative time in our history. O’Reilly and Duggard’s attention to detail and their successful tug on the readers heart strings make a relatively distant topic both tangible and personal. Though the build up to the assassination is a bit dry, we eventually see a nation in mourning and, through Booth’s escape, a nation in which many continued to harbor Confederate sympathies.
Despite at least one historical inaccuracy – that the Oval Office was not yet built by Lincoln’s era – the book seems very well researched; the appendix and period pictures complete this book as a solid historical thriller that’s definitely worth your time investment, Save Jerseyans.
Special thanks to Macmillan Audio for this audio clip preview (Click here).
I think Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter provides a much more engaging story of Lincoln's assassination. Because in O'Reilly's book, John Wilkes Booth is not a vampire.