num_pages: 339
description: James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty he rose to become a wunderkind scholar a Civil War hero and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didnt kill Garfield. The drama of what happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turmoil. The unhinged assassins half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for powerover his administration over the nations future and hauntingly over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments to disastrous effect. As his condition worsened Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell the inventor of the telephone worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet. Meticulously researched epic in scope and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history.
language: English
title: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
publisher: Doubleday