I have a book review in The Washington Post! It’s about Susan Wels’ book An Assassin in Utopia.
Excerpt:
On July 2, 1881, President James Garfield was in a good mood. Having completed a few months in office, Gaffy, as at least one of his friends called him, was going on vacation. It was a welcome break from the presidency, which Garfield found tedious and depressing. After doing a handspring over a bed in the White House, the 49-year-old president headed to the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station. He was accompanied by Secretary of State James Blaine — and no security. While waiting for the train, he was suddenly shot twice and fell to the ground. Though he survived the initial incident, Garfield would ultimately succumb to his wounds a few months later.
The killer, Charles Guiteau, was delusional and obsessive, a stalker who believed that murdering Garfield would save the Republican Party. He was also a former member of a New York utopian colony, the Oneida Community.
Like that once-famous colony, Garfield’s untimely death has been largely forgotten today, but both take on central roles in Susan Wels’s book “An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder.”