Review: Tremendous Storyline and Content
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 4, 2012
There have been numerous books written about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  This was one of those instances which has been seared into our national consciousness.  Some books have been academic, some more to the fictional account.  But in A Night of Horrors, John C. Berry has perhaps bridged the two as has no one else.One thing to point out though, is that this is fiction.  The author had to re-create dialogues and choose what actually happened from various theories offered by all those historians and academics.  With controversial events such as if Booth really did break his leg jumping to the stage, Berry chose one version (the more widely accepted one, in this case.)Regardless, even as fiction, the book was fascinating.  The author's prodigious research gave him a very broad foundation from which to weave his tale.  And although we all know the outcome, I, at least, felt the literary tension continue to rise as the narrative approached that fateful encounter in Ford's theater.Although I am fairly well versed in the events surrounding the assassination, I picked up many details about which I wasn't previously aware.  All these details, coupled with the human face given them, created a much more engrossing narrative than the typical academic study.Without a doubt, the content presented in this book  was simply amazing.  So why only four stars?  While the content was top-notch, the mechanical aspect of the writing, unfortunately, was not.  Paragraphs ran on and on, with 500 words being common.  A long paragraph is not, in and of itself, a problem if it follows a particular train of thought or action.  But in this book, the flow often jumped from one aspect to another, yet there were no paragraph breaks.Transitions were somewhat weak, and variations in sentence structure were sometimes lacking.  In one particular paragraph, for example, there were 11 sentences.  Of these, seven of them started with "He" did this... or "He" did that.  One of the others, instead of starting with "He," the author did change that to "Booth," at least.While the dialogue was reasonable given the period, I wish the author would have "updated" his wording a bit in the narrative sections.  I think it would have helped in the flow.For the research and material presented, this book is certainly a five-star effort.  It pains me to give it "only" four stars overall, but as a reader, I feel that both the content and the wordsmithing have to be superb for an overall five-star rating.