Assassination Vacation, brought to us by Sarah Vowell, and a generous grant by the Simon and Schuster corporation (and viewers like you), is a book about the historical tourism that surrounds three perpetual history footnotes and walking, talking national tragedies: John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz and Charles Giteau.

The book is a four-part play: part travel journal, part history lesson, part John Wilkes Booth/Charles Giteau/Leon Czolgosz mini-biography, and part slice-of-life work. Sarah Vowell gets on the cold trail of three presidential assassins, and frolics in the ephemera of their old haunts. Armed with a unique curiosity, a local friend, and a love of plaques, Sarah ransacks museums, B&B's, statues, and local sites of interest for anything to fill in the blanks of the Cainian revelry that ended the lives of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley.

In the context of history, this book is stacked with corollary deliciousness. One of my favorite examples of the contextual intelligence of this book is Vowell's take on the modernism-versus-classicism architecture discussion.

[B]ecause honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-a** despair? It's not? Whew.

POSITIVES:
If Sarah Vowell was any more jaded you could make jewelry from her, but at least she would offer a lot of gems. The awkward silence of the past pertaining to the horrific slaying of past presidents has been thankfully broken by the spirit and occasional Melancholiana of this popular and able nonfiction writer. The genre definitely benefits from Sarah Vowell's choreography of a relatively fresh and under-contemplated topic of American heritage. She is an admitted political partisan, yet her writing can be enjoyed by readers of every fashion. The thesis was simple and heroic, and the anecdotes were thoroughly entertaining.

NEGATIVES:
The only real negative of this book was that some of the conclusions from the political dimension of this book were a little undernourished and mazy. In one example, Vowell concurs that when the U.S. pulled out of the south after the Reconstruction, it was an affront to slaves: "By pulling the troops out of Dixie... (the northern states) were selling out the freed slaves."

The Reconstruction wasn't exactly a slam dunk to begin with, so it is a tinge stretchy to conclude that its demise would have worried freed slaves much more than usual.

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Ms. Vowell was a Bobcat, and attended the Chicago Institute of Art where she flogged the collegial dead horse with graduate studies. Sarah became a music critic, and in 1996 won the Music Journalism Award. She has written for Esquire, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Salon, San Francisco Weekly, Spin, and the Village Voice. And for a "geek" she sure has been on a lot of hip television shows. Vowell has graced the stages of Letterman, Conan O'Brien, The Daily Show (with your host John Stewart), and the hippest of them all: Nightline. Other works of hers include: Radio On: A Listener's Diary, Take the Canoli: Stories From the New World, and The Partly Cloudy Patriot. Vowell has also done voice work for on the movie The Incredibles and drops in on public radio from time to time to do a spot on This American Life.
Edited: PC