num_pages: 320
description: Here is Lincoln in the Bardo for real. You couldnt make it upnecromancers mad actors frauds true believers and in the middle the greatest President. Sidney Blumenthal author of The Political Life of Abraham LincolnThe story of Abraham Lincoln as it has never been told before: through the strange even otherworldly points of contact between his family and that of the man who killed him John Wilkes Booth. In the 1820s two families unknown to each other worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meetand yet they did. The son of one family the famed actor John Wilkes Booth killed the son of the other President Abraham Lincoln in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder however did not come without warningin fact it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the presidents fascination with Spiritualism and to demonstrate how it linked him uncannily to the man who would kill him. Abraham Lincoln is usually seen as a rational empirically-minded man yet as acclaimed scholar and biographer Terry Alford reveals he was also deeply superstitious and drawn to the irrational. Like millions of other Americans including the Booths Lincoln and his wife Mary suffered repeated personal tragedies and turned for solace to Spiritualism a new practice sweeping the nation that held that the dead were nearby and could be contacted by the living. Remarkably the Lincolns and the Booths even used the same mediums including Charles Colchester a specialist in blood writing whom Mary first brought to her husband and who warned the president after listening to the ravings of another of his clients John Wilkes Booth. Alfords expansive richly-textured chronicle follows the two families across the nineteenth century uncovering new facts and stories about Abraham and Mary while drawing indelible portraits of the Boothsfrom patriarch Julius a famous actor in his own right to brother Edwin the most talented member of the family and a man who feared peacock feathers to their confidant Adam Badeau who would become strangely the ghostwriter for President Ulysses S. Grant. At every turn Alford shows that despite the progress of the agethe glass hypodermic syringe electromagnetic induction and much moredeath remained ever-present and thus it was only rational for millions of Americans from the president on down to cling to beliefs that seem anything but. A novelistic narrative of two exceptional American families set against the convulsions their times In the Houses of Their Dead ultimately leads us to consider how ghost stories helped shape the nation. 33 black-and-white images
language: English
title: In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits
publisher: Liveright