Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history. As his condition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. This narrative history tracks the stories of three men as their lives move closer to intersecting: Former President James Garfield, who rose from extreme poverty to national renown as a scholar and war hero before his reluctant election to Congress and then the 20th U.S. The unhinged assassin's half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for powerover his administration, over the nation's future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. Only 100 days into office, President Garfield was shot down in a train station by a disturbed office seeker. The drama of what happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turmoil. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back.īut the shot didn't kill Garfield. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Biography & Autobiography, History Topic. Guiteau in Washington, D.C., in July 1881, took a bullet in the back muscle. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Lot 2 Benjamin Franklin- An American Life & Garfield, Destiny Of The Republic Genre.

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