Although I bought it quite some time ago, I just read the book this past weekend and was blown away. The book retells the story of the last few days of the Civil War in such detail I felt like I was right in the middle of it, or at least standing on the side of the road watching it. I couldn't put the book down. Well researched, brilliantly told, very riveting. The only downside, to me, was that it only told the last two days. I guess they thought they should focus a bit on Lincoln for some reason after the war was over If you are interested in the history of the Civil War, and haven't read this book, I strongly suggest it. If the history books in school were like this, I KNOW I would have paid more attention! If you did read it, what did you think about it? Did anything in the book surprise you? Although I had learned over the years that Booth was not a lone actor, I was shocked that they never mentioned in history that he wasn't the only one that was supposed to die.
There was a time I considered reading this book but then as I always do, I checked out the Amazon ratings. I don't think I've ever seen any book during my more than a decade buying from Amazon, with more than 1,200 1-star reviews. Now in being fair, I had assumed that was because of the people not liking O'Reilly (oh now isn't THAT a mature way to rate a book instead of actual content?! Sheesh!) but then I noticed that a lot of those reviews mentioned inaccurate historical facts were given. Always a deal breaker for me. On the other hand, there were more than 4,000 5-star reviews, but if the facts in the book are wrong, many of those people wouldn't know that it wasn't factual. I guess we're back to the "research many sources" issue that we talked about here a day or two ago. In any case, I'm very glad you enjoyed the book and I'll most likely read it sometime because I so enjoy reading Civil War material.
