Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, by Terry Alford
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Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, by Terry Alford
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With a single shot from a pistol small enough to conceal in his hand, John Wilkes Booth catapulted into history on the night of April 14, 1865. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln stunned a nation that was just emerging from the chaos and calamity of the Civil War, and the president's untimely death altered the trajectory of postwar history. But to those who knew Booth, the event was even more shocking-for no one could have imagined that this fantastically gifted actor and well-liked man could commit such an atrocity.In Fortune's Fool, Terry Alford provides the first comprehensive look at the life of an enigmatic figure whose life has been overshadowed by his final, infamous act. Tracing Booth's story from his uncertain childhood in Maryland, characterized by a difficult relationship with his famous actor father, to his successful acting career on stages across the country, Alford offers a nuanced picture of Booth as a public figure, performer, and deeply troubled man. Despite the fame and success that attended Booth's career--he was billed at one point as "the youngest star in the world"--he found himself consumed by the Confederate cause and the desire to help the South win its independence. Alford reveals the tormented path that led Booth to conclude, as the Confederacy collapsed in April 1865, that the only way to revive the South and punish the North for the war would be to murder Lincoln--whatever the cost to himself or others. The textured and compelling narrative gives new depth to the familiar events at Ford's Theatre and the aftermath that followed, culminating in Booth's capture and death at the hands of Union soldiers 150 years ago.Based on original research into government archives, historical libraries, and family records, Fortune's Fool offers the definitive portrait of John Wilkes Booth.
Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, by Terry Alford- Amazon Sales Rank: #185776 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-17
- Released on: 2015-03-17
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review "Alford's masterful biography charts the psychological space in which Booth seems to have zigzagged for most of his life, between artistic sensitivity and delusional self-inflation....The book is as deeply as it is broadly researched, giving us both the daily textures of Booth's life and the arcing currents of his time, not only a story about the assassin, but also about the culture from which his infamy sprung." - Peter Birkenhead, Los Angeles Review of Books"Fortune's Fool is a better, more comprehensive, and more consistently fascinating attempt at explaining John Wilkes Booth than any yet written." -- Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly"Alford has produced a deeply and exhaustively researched monograph that offers a complex portrait of Booth drawn from those who knew him or at least thought they knew him. At the same time, the book contains a wealth of anecdotes and amusing notes that simply make it a wonderfully written biography of one of the most notorious figures in American history." -- Brian C. Miller, Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-SAWH) "Terry Alford has delivered a nuanced and intricate portrait of killer John Wilkes Booth, and he has also vividly depicted the arc of his life and the context of a fiercely divided America in a way that echoes life today. A natural storyteller, Alford explains how Booth fixated on Lincoln, and how he came to see the president as the cause of the nation's ills." -- Elizabeth Taylor, Literary Editor at Large of the Chicago Tribune and a National Book Critics Circle Board Member"As Alford's excellent book makes clear, Booth was a celebrity in his own right, and his high profile heightened the drama of the deed: imagine if Elvis Presley had assassinated President John F. Kennedy." -Foreign Affairs
"Fortune's Fool is so deeply researched and persuasively argued that it should stand as the standard portrait for years... Readers will know how this story ended, but Mr. Alford's recounting of Booth's flight and the Army's manhunt is a tour de force of sustained drama, never losing its breakneck pace and offering startling revelations." -- Harold Holzer, The Wall Street Journal"A vivid, gripping portrait of the charming, impetuous, and troubled Booth, whose ill-fated and ultimately murderous path often seems to strangely echo the doomed Shakespearean characters he played on stage. " -- Library Journal"The 'first full-length biography' of Abraham Lincoln's assassin offers much nuance and complexity to the killer ... Alford sifts through the more balanced, credible sources of those who knew Booth before the assassination to flesh out a surprisingly engaging portrait of the brilliant young actor and deeply riven sympathizer to the Southern cause ... Alford paints some intriguing shades of gray in this elucidating portrait." -- Kirkus Reviews"Exemplary... Alford's book examines Booth's movements and interactions in greater depth than any of its predecessors, drawing a clear picture of the psychological spiral that led to his plot to kidnap -- and, when that failed, to kill -- the president." -- The Boston Globe"Based on meticulous and exhaustive research, written in vivid prose spiced with wry humor, Terry Alford's Fortune's Fool is a tour de force by a masterful historian. This eagerly awaited biography exceeds the high expectations so long entertained by Civil War buffs, Lincolnians, and lovers of American history in general." -- Michael Burlingame, author of Abraham Lincoln: A LifeAbout the Author Terry Alford is Professor Emeritus of History at Northern Virginia Community College. He is the author of Prince Among Slaves, which was made into an award-winning PBS documentary in 2007.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful. Excellent biography of one of history's most infamous villains By J. Weaver In the introduction, Terry Alford states that "Fortune's Fool is the first full-length biography of John Wilkes Booth ever written." It's almost impossible to believe, as Booth was one of the most well-known actors of his time and more information exists about his life than contemporaries who were not so famous prior to becoming infamous. But, as best I can tell, the claim is true; there have been shorter works about Booth, as well as multiple longer books about his life leading up to and following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but no full books about his entire life.We see in these pages a man of many contradictions, whom it is tough to reconcile with the assassin we already know. By all reputable contemporary accounts (and Alford includes and remarks upon many not-so-reputable accounts as well), he was driven and held intensely to his political beliefs, but none suspected him of being capable of murder, much less the murder of the President of the United States. Many facts revealed in this book were shocking (for instance, his grandfather often helped local slaves escape, and Booth himself was adamantly against secession until it actually occurred).Alford's writing style isn't the most captivating that I've ever read, but it's far from dry and unreadable, and Booth proves to be an interesting enough figure to make up for even the lengthiest lists of stage actors who are next to impossible to keep straight without referring to a previous page. In the end, though Alford doesn't apologize for or seem to sympathize with Booth's beliefs and actions, we're left with what can only be seen as one man's descent into what seems some form of madness, a story that would be tragic if not for its outcome.Definitely worth reading for anyone with any interest in American history, as it provides the overlooked other side of one of our nation's darkest moments.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful. A ghost from history brought to life By Brian W. Fairbanks Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, but history refuses to free the 16th president from John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who ended Lincoln's life on the evening of April 14, 1865. Booth's ghost haunts Lincoln's legacy and is now resurrected in Terry Alford's Fortune's Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth. In the introduction, Alford offers the surprising information that this is the first full-length biography of the actor whose most famous role was not on the stage of Ford's Theater, but in the box where Lincoln was watching a performance of Our American Cousin. Like other infamous figures, Booth has been defined by his most notorious act, but he did more than pull the trigger on that fateful night.The son of a brilliant actor, Booth was a brilliant actor himself, a famous one, too, once billed as "the youngest star in the world." As a boy, he had "a gentle disposition" and was his parents' favorite of their nine children. Later, he was "a wild and impetuous youth" with a sadistic love of torturing and killing cats. In adulthood, he was a deeply troubled man whose obsession with the fortunes of the South made his encounter with Lincoln seem almost predestined. A fortune teller who read his palm told him, "I've never seen a worse hand. I wish I hadn't seen it." She said his would be a "life full enough of sorrow, full of trouble."And so it was. Alford follows Booth's sorrowful life to its conclusion, writing with force and bringing his subject into clear focus. John Wilkes Booth made his mark, a bloody and regrettable one, that will stain Lincoln's legacy and American history forevermore.Brian W. Fairbanks
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful. Essential reading for all students of Abraham Lincoln By Robert Moore I have been a passionate student of the life and ideas of Abraham Lincoln for a very long while and currently own approximately 250 to 275 books either by or on the man I believe to be not only the greatest American president, but the greatest American. But there is a gap in my large Lincoln collection: I own only two books on the assassination of Lincoln. Furthermore, I always get a sense of dread when a biography approaches April 1865. I believe it to be one of the great tragedies in American history, and especially in Southern history. No one caused more harm to the South, in my opinion, that John Wilkes Booth. Instead of a president who genuinely believed in reconstruction, we instead got an inept president who favored retaliation and a Congress that shared his mood, if they shared almost nothing else.As a result of this avoidance on my part of reading about the killing of Lincoln I have really not learned much more about Booth than I learned from various Lincoln biographies. That is actually quite a bit, but nonetheless I found that this wonderfully researched and well-written biography of Booth to be exceptionally informative. I came away from it understanding significantly more about Booth, how his personal beliefs were formed, and the why he thought killing Lincoln to be a heroic act instead of the utterly stupid event that it actually was. One also gains a sense that Booth's killing of Lincoln was not just a horrible loss to America by losing a genuinely great president, but a meaningless waste of Booth's own life. "Fortune's Fool" is an apt phrase for the title. So much loss for such a ill-conceived project.I heartily recommend this book. If you are interested in Abraham Lincoln, I strongly recommend two books about the assassination and burial of Lincoln. I recommend this one as the best volume on his actual assassination, and I recommend the Kunhardt's TWENTY DAYS: A NARRATIVE IN TEXT AND PICTURES OF THE ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE TWENTY DAYS AND NIGHTS THAT FOLLOWED (one of my most treasured Lincoln volumes is Don E. Fehrenbacher's LINCOLN IN TEXT AND CONTEXT, which contains an inscription from Fehrenbacher to two members of the Merserve family - a Kunhardt married a Merserve, and the absolutely gigantic collection of Lincoln photos the Merserve's had collected moved into the Kunhardt's, who continued to expand the collection and bless us with several splendid and lavishly illustrated books on Lincoln - so I have a book inscribed by one of the greatest Lincoln scholars to the greatest collectors of Lincoln photos, which were used to produce TWENTY DAYS). I don't have the tiniest bit more of sympathy for Booth than I did before, but I do feel that I know and understand him more.
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