My Thoughts Be Bloody The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Name: My Thoughts Be Bloody The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9781416586067

ISBN-10: 1416586067

ISBN-13: 9781416586067

Edition: N/A

Authors: Nora Titone, Doris Kearns Goodwin

List price: $27.99

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Description:

The sceneof John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre is among the most vivid and indelible images in American history. The literal story of what happened on April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really wasbesides a killeris less well known. The magnitude of his crime has obscured for generations a startling personal story that was integral to his motivation.My Thoughts Be Bloody,a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln's death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes's older… brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. He won his celebrity at the precocious age of nineteen, before the Civil War began, when John Wilkes was a schoolboy. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln's assassin has never been told. Using an array of private letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the Booth family, Titone has uncovered a hidden history that reveals the reasons why John Wilkes Booth became this country's most notorious assassin. These ambitious brothers, born to theatrical parents, enacted a tale of mutual jealousy and resentment worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. From childhood, the stage-struck brothers were rivals for the approval of their father, legendary British actor Junius Brutus Booth. After his death, Edwin and John Wilkes were locked in a fierce contest to claim his legacy of fame. This strange family history and powerful sibling rivalry were the crucibles of John Wilkes's character, exacerbating his political passions and driving him into a life of conspiracy. To re-create the lost world of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, this book takes readers on a panoramic tour of nineteenth-century America, from the streets of 1840s Baltimore to the gold fields of California, from the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama to the glittering mansions of Gilded Age New York. Edwin, ruthlessly competitive and gifted, did everything he could to lock his younger brother out of the theatrical game. As he came of age, John Wilkes found his plans for stardom thwarted by his older sibling's meteoric rise. Their divergent pathsEdwin's an upward race to riches and social prominence, and John's a downward spiral into failure and obscuritykept pace with the hardening of their opposite political views and their mutual dislike. The details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln have been well documented elsewhere.My Thoughts Be Bloodytells a new story, one that explains for the first time why Lincoln's assassin decided to conspire against the president in the first place, and sets that decision in the context of a bitterly divided familyand nation. By the end of this riveting journey, readers will see Abraham Lincoln's death less as the result of the war between the North and South and more as the climax of a dark struggle between two brothers who never wore the uniform of soldiers, except on stage.

Book details

List price: $27.99
Publisher: Free Press
Publication date: 5/31/2011
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 496
Size: 5.50" wide x 8.44" long x 1.40" tall
Weight: 0.990
Language: English

Doris Kearns Goodwin was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 4, 1943. She received a bachelor of arts degree from Colby College in 1964 and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in 1968. She taught at Harvard University and worked as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson during his last year in the White House. She has written numerous books including The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, Wait Till Next Year, and The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. She has received numerous awards including Pulitzer Prize in history, the Harold Washington Literary Award, the Ambassador Book Award for No…