I really enjoyed this novel about John Wilkes Booth narrated by John Surratt, the one conspirator who was not killed or executed after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In the novel, Surratt is more of Booth's dupe than a partner in conspiracy.
The novel has Surratt in 1916 looking through his old diary and old photographs for the first time in fifty years and reliving the time before the assassination, even his chance meeting with Lincoln himself while working as a photographer's assistant.
One thought of Surratt's really stood out to me when Surratt is helping to photograph some of the Confederate dead.
I thought of how rapidly the war was shrinking into an historical irrelevance. Already the relic-hunters, scavengers, and little boys were returning to its battlefields to collect the war, sell it, trivialize it. We Americans have no real need for history: we spit it out like a cherry pit. Would our descendants in the next century stand like tourists above the hills of the famous Civil War battles, ignoring the ghostly screams of the past from the valley below?
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