A review by simlish
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
3.0
Assassination Vacation is a weird little book, covering the assassinations of US Presidents via assassination tourism -- visits to places and objects related to each assassination. It gets into some really interesting background details, the sorts of things I'd never heard of before -- not, admittedly, that I previously knew much of anything about Garfield or McKinley's assassinations.
I listened to the audiobook, which I found wildly overproduced -- anyone who gets quoted gets a different voice actor, some of whom I had difficulty understanding, and I always found the cutting from voice to voice jarring, especially in "Lines," she said, "of text like this," where Vowell would read the dialogue tag. It also had random music. As I do most of my listening while driving, each random bit of music startled the hell out of me and had me wildly searching the road for where it was coming from.
In some ways it was very dated -- the r-word gets thrown around pretty casually! she talks about Dubya like he's the worst thing that could happen to the Oval Office! -- and in some ways it was incredibly topical and relevant.
It's a book that definitely grew on me. I disliked the beginning so much I nearly put it down, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. I feel like I learned a lot (particularly fond of the semi-local-to-me sex cult that Garfield's assassin lived in for five years but he was so terrible that no one would sleep with him), and I had fun doing so.
I listened to the audiobook, which I found wildly overproduced -- anyone who gets quoted gets a different voice actor, some of whom I had difficulty understanding, and I always found the cutting from voice to voice jarring, especially in "Lines," she said, "of text like this," where Vowell would read the dialogue tag. It also had random music. As I do most of my listening while driving, each random bit of music startled the hell out of me and had me wildly searching the road for where it was coming from.
In some ways it was very dated -- the r-word gets thrown around pretty casually! she talks about Dubya like he's the worst thing that could happen to the Oval Office! -- and in some ways it was incredibly topical and relevant.
It's a book that definitely grew on me. I disliked the beginning so much I nearly put it down, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. I feel like I learned a lot (particularly fond of the semi-local-to-me sex cult that Garfield's assassin lived in for five years but he was so terrible that no one would sleep with him), and I had fun doing so.