Assassination Vacation

All right-- so Sarah Vowell's book is a NYT bestseller and therefor unlikely to need a recommendation from me. But it gets one anyway.

Vowell is often given the tag "humorous historian," and that's a disservice (I blame it on all the people who think history is inherently dull and must be buffed up with an unexpected adjective in order to sell).

Vowell is an astute observer, the best kind of combined scholar and journalist. More simply, she's a smart woman who finds everything interesting, and so sees not just the thing itself, but also the may ways in which it connects and parallels and echoes a dozen other slices of human experience. Presidential tombs are cool, and so are the insights of her three-year-old nephew, and so are the ways in which the two intersect. She is emotive but not sentimental, smart and still grounded. (She is, simply, the next woman I want to marry).

Assassination Vacation is a series of road trips, explorations of the deaths of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. It's filled with the kinds of observations that can only come from visiting the actual places, and the kind of connections and details that only come from possessing curiosity, brainpower and interest that are all-consuming. The chapter on Lincoln in particular is loaded with details and extra stories that are both fascinating and surprising.

Once we've settled all that, I can return to saying that Vowell is also funny. Not funny as in "let's make fun of this ancient old stuff" or "let me use this exhibit as a prop for my own hilarious shtick" or "let me stir up some shocked laughter with my zany irreverence." This is the friend you take to the museum who first looks at the exhibit with open admiration and then talks the curator into letting you in the back room to peak under the crates.

My daughter was kind enough to get me this book as a gift; it's my first by Vowell, but she now tops the list of authors whose work I would buy without concern for the subject matter.
This is a great book-- informative, enlightening, witty, smart, fun and, yes, funny. As highly recommended as anything I've ever read.