shopping cart
Save up to 30% on our Staff Picks
Call us:  800-878-7323 HELP
McAfee SECURE helps keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams.
Original Essays | September 23, 2009

Jonathan Lethem: IMG Stops: On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe



For me, there's a weird, unfathomable gulf — I almost wrote gulp — between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has... Continue »
  1. $19.56 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

    Chronic City

    Jonathan Lethem

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$6.98
List price: $15.00
Sale Trade Paper
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
Qty Store Section
1 Beaverton US History- 1800 to 1945
3 Burnside US History- 1860 to 1920
1 Hawthorne US History- US Presidency

Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America

by Eric Rauchway

Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

When President McKinley was murdered at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901, Americans were bereaved and frightened. Rumor ran rampant: A wild-eyed foreign anarchist with an unpronounceable name had killed the Commander-in-Chief. Eric Rauchway's brilliant Murdering McKinley re-creates Leon Czolgosz's hastily conducted trial and then traverses America as Dr. Vernon Briggs, a Boston alienist, sets out to discover why Czolgosz rose up to kill his President. While uncovering the answer that eluded Briggs and setting the historical record straight about Czolgosz, Rauchway also provides the finest portrait yet of Theodore Roosevelt at the moment of his sudden ascension to the White House.

For Czolgosz was neither a foreigner nor much of an anarchist. Born in Detroit, he was an American-made assassin of such inchoate political beliefs that Emma Goldman dismissed him as a police informant. Indeed, Brigg's search for answers---in the records of the Auburn New York State penitentiary where Czolgosz was electrocuted, in Cleveland where Leon's remaining family lived---only increased the mystery. Roosevelt, however, cared most for the meanings he could fix to this "crime against free government all over the world." For Roosevelt was every inch the calculating politician, his supposed boyish impulsiveness more feint than fact. At one moment encouraging the belief that Czolgosz's was a political crime, at the next that it was a deranged one, Roosevelt used the specter of McKinley's death to usher in Progressive Era America.

So why did Czolgosz do it? Only Rauchway's careful sifting of long-ignored evidence provides an answer: heart-broken, recently radicalized, and thinking he had only months to live, Leon decided to take the most powerful man in America with him.

Synopsis:

When President William McKinley was murdered at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901, Americans were bereaved and frightened. Rumor ran rampant: A wild-eyed foreign anarchist with an unpronounceable name had killed the commander-in-chief. Eric Rauchway's brilliant Murdering McKinley restages Leon Czolgosz's hastily conducted trial and then traverses America with Dr. Vernon Briggs, a Boston alienist who sets out to discover why Czolgosz rose up to kill his president.

About the Author

Eric Rauchway has written about history for The Financial Times and The Los Angeles Times. He teaches at the University of California, Davis and is the author of The Refuge of Affections. He lives in Northern California with his family and one dog.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780809016389
Subtitle:
The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America
Author:
Rauchway, Eric
Publisher:
Hill & Wang
Subject:
United States - General
Subject:
United States - 19th Century/Turn of the Century
Subject:
Conspiracy & Scandal Investigations
Subject:
United States - 20th Century (1900-1945)
Subject:
Government - Executive Branch
Subject:
Presidents
Subject:
Assassins
Subject:
Progressivism (united states politics)
Subject:
Presidents -- United States.
Copyright:
Publication Date:
September 2004
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
272
Dimensions:
826x560x74 56

Other books you might like

  1. $27.00 New Trade Paper add to wish list
  2. $25.75 New Trade Paper add to wish list
  3. $3.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list
  4. $40.25 New Trade Paper add to wish list
  5. $6.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    The best and the brightest

    David Halberstam
  6. $11.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

Related Aisles

  • back to top

Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.