Today's Reading List

Civil war buffs (like myself) will find this one interesting - Bloody Crimes, the Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse.  Here's part of a review of the book:

Halfway through his 2006 best seller, "Manhunt"—which chronicles the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth following the murder of Abraham Lincoln—James Swanson mentions "another sensational manhunt" that was just then getting under way. But he says almost nothing else about the flight of Jefferson Davis. It began in Richmond, Va., on April 2, 1865, and ended 38 days later with the Confederate president's capture in rural Georgia.

Now Mr. Swanson fills out the story in "Bloody Crimes," a skillful narrative that recounts both Davis's escapade and the journey of Lincoln's corpse from Washington, D.C., to its final resting place in Springfield, Ill. If this semi-sequel isn't quite as gripping as its predecessor—"Manhunt" is one of the most riveting Civil War books of our time—the fault doesn't lie entirely with Mr. Swanson. The Davis manhunt simply isn't as compelling as the stuff of chasing a presidential killer. Yet "Bloody Crimes" enriches our understanding of Lincoln's assassination and its aftermath.

Lincoln, of course, haunts the book. In the spring of 1865, he is alive and constantly rushing over to the telegraph office to check for news from the front, not unlike a 21st- century BlackBerry addict. The day of victory finally arrives, but then Booth guns him down and he enters the pantheon of American heroes.

Shortly before the assassination, Jefferson Davis quit Richmond as Union troops advanced on the Confederate capital. He loaded aides aboard a getaway train and tried to operate "a government on wheels," as one young soldier called it. Lincoln's wartime rival hoped to keep his stillborn nation alive even after Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. [...]

Mr. Swanson reveals the true reason for all of those floral decorations at the open-casket displays: "Fragrant flowers would mask the odor." As Davis tried to fend off the inevitable, so did Lincoln's preservationists: "Lincoln's face turned darker by the day, and the embalmer tried to conceal this with fresh applications of chalk-white potions." By the end of the journey, the body "looked like a ghastly, pale, waxlike effigy." All told, more than a million Americans gazed upon the decomposing Lincoln.

Newspapers "obsessed over the minutiae of the funeral obsequies," writes Mr. Swanson. No detail "was too obscure to observe or report." Mr. Swanson's own approach is exhaustive, too. In places, he packs in more information than readers will want, such as the names of the nine subcommittees that helped Cleveland organize its public reception. Curiously, however, he leaves out any reference to the fact that a 6-year-old Theodore Roosevelt watched the funeral procession move through Manhattan. A famous photo shows Teddy gazing down from a second-floor window of his grandfather's home near Union Square. In the coming century, he and Lincoln would be joined again at Mount Rushmore.