Book Review: A president under fire - and the aftermath
14th April 1865: The assassination of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln by actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, Washington DC. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
THE Booth family tombstone in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, is, as Karen Joy Fowler describes it in this epic novel about the distinguished 19th-century American theatrical clan, “a marble obelisk … almost twenty feet high”.
Like that obelisk, the Booth name still casts a long shadow over the US landscape: today we remember the family chiefly because one of its sons, John Wilkes Booth, was the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
