A deranged man shot James A. Garfield, but it was his doctors who killed him. "Charlie said, 'Hell, If I am guilty, Then God is as well.' But God was acquitted And Charlie committed Until he should hang." - Stephen Sondheim "The Ballad of Guiteau," from "Assassins" IF an obscure 19th-century president falls, does he make a noise? A cruel thing to ask, but historically the assassination of James A. Garfield made little difference. The death of Abraham Lincoln, 16 years earlier, was seen as a Christlike sacrifice - and left generations of historians guessing what his continued presence might have meant for Reconstruction. The later shootings of William McKinley and John F. Kennedy allowed the ascent of two of our most dynamic presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom pushed through long overdue social and economic reforms. The death of President Garfield led to ... the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, of whom the best anyone could say was that he was more honest than expected. Garfield was one of the "Ohio Seven," that spate of singularly undistinguished presidents from the Buckeye State who served between 1869 and 1923. At their best, they presided over some years of prosperity; at their worst, they gave us two of the most corrupt administrations in our history. Yet it is one of the many pleasures of Candice Millard's new book, "Destiny of the Republic," that she brings poor Garfield to life - and a remarkable life it was. He was the last president to be born in a log cabin. His father died when James was just 1, succumbing to "exhaustion and fever" after fighting a wildfire that had threatened his home. The boy's mother struggled desperately to make a living for James and his three siblings but donated some of her farmland so their community would have a schoolhouse. James was taught to consider himself the equal of any man - to walk "with his shoulders squared and his head thrown back," a trait he would always possess. A near drowning while he labored on the Erie and Ohio Canal convinced him that God "had saved me for my mother and for something greater and better than canalling," he wrote. For the next few years, he worked his way up through local schools and Williams College; at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College), a preparatory school, he mastered his studies so thoroughly that he was promoted from janitor to assistant professor. Returning there to teach, he became the school's president at 26. In his spare time, he passed the Ohio bar. Excelling both in combat and as a top staff officer, he rose to the rank of major general during the Civil War but was sickened by the carnage of battle. "Garfield would later tell a friend," Millard writes, "that 'something went out of him ... that never came back; the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.' " Elected to Congress in 1862, Garfield fought for black rights and liberty, writing in his pocket diary, "Servitium esto damnatum" - "slavery be damned." Modest to a fault, he toiled diligently in the legislative vineyards for 17 years. Even his foibles were endearing: he loved to hear himself talk (speaking "on the floor of Congress more than 40 times in a single day"), something he admitted was a "fatal facility." To everyone's amazement, he won the Republican nomination in 1880, in a deadlocked convention. With a plurality of just 10,000 votes, he became the last member of the House to go directly to the White House. Personally, Garfield said he preferred the "quiet country beauty" of Mentor, Ohio, where he worked the fields and raised five children with his wife, Lucretía. After a difficult courtship and early marriage, complicated by the death of the couple's first child, he began an affair with Lucia Gilbert Calhoun, a reporter for The New York Tribune; but by the time of his election he was inseparable from his wife, the "life of my life." Their exuberant extended family included his mother, who wrote a friend from the White House, "I feel very thankful for such a son." On the morning of July 2, 1881, the president of the United States burst into the room of his teenage sons and picked one up under each arm, swinging them about as he sang a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. He did a flip, "then hopped across the room balanced only on his fingers and toes." Garfield had reason to be happy. He had just finished outmaneuvering a major Republican rival and was about to travel with his boys to the Jersey Shore, where Lucretia was recovering from a bout of malaria. A few hours later he lay on the floor of the Baltimore and Potomac train station, shot in the back by a deranged individual named Charles J. Guiteau, who imagined he was responsible for Garfield's election and deserved to be made consul general to France. Like so many American assassins, Guiteau was a shadow of the man he shot - one of that chilling breed for whom, as Stephen Sondheim so brilliantly wrote in "Assassins," "There's another national anthem playing,/Not the one you cheer/At the ballpark." Raised by a father "so certain of his relationship with God that he believed he would never die," Guiteau, suffering perhaps from syphilis, led a peripatetic existence, failing as a lawyer and an evangelist, unable to find love even at a free love colony, where the women nicknamed him "Charles Gitout." Unable to do, he would not stop believing himself a great man, awarding himself august, delusional titles like "Premier of the British Lion." His behavior became so strange that his wife and siblings feared for their lives and his, and his sister tried to find him help. In a depressingly familiar story, this proved hard to come by - but for Guiteau to pick up a cheap gun was easy. Denied a position befitting his illusions, he decided God wanted him to kill the president and stalked Garfield for weeks before the shooting. Had Garfield been left where he lay, he might well have survived; the bullet failed to hit his spine or penetrate any vital organs. Instead, he was given over to the care of doctors, who basically tortured him to death over the next 11 weeks. Two of them repeatedly probed his wound with their unsterilized fingers and instruments before having him carted back to the White House on a hay-and-horsehair mattress. There, control of the president was seized by a quack with the incredible name of Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. Dr. Doctor Bliss insisted on stuffing Garfield with heavy meals and alcohol, which brought on protracted waves of vomiting. He and his assistants went on probing the wound several times a day, causing infections that burrowed enormous tunnels of pus throughout the president's body. Garfield's medical "care" is one of the most fascinating, if appalling, parts of Millard's narrative. Joseph Lister had been demonstrating for years how his theories on the prevention of infection could save lives and limbs, but American doctors largely ignored his advice, not wanting to "go to all the trouble" of washing hands and instruments, Millard writes, enamored of the macho trappings of their profession, the pus and blood and what they referred to fondly as the "good old surgical stink" of the operating room. Further undermining the president's recovery was his sickroom in the White House - then a rotting, vermin-ridden structure with broken sewage pipes. Outside, Washington was a pestilential stink hole; besides the first lady, four White House servants and Guiteau himself had contracted malaria. Hoping to save Garfield from the same, Bliss fed him large doses of quinine, causing more intestinal cramping. The people rallied around their president even as his doctors failed him. The great Western explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell helped design America's first air-conditioning system to relieve Garfield's agony. Alexander Graham Bell worked tirelessly to invent a device that could locate the bullet. (It failed when Dr. Bliss insisted he search only the wrong side of Garfield's torso.) Two thousand people worked overnight to lay 3,200 feet of railroad track, so the president might be taken to a cottage on the Jersey Shore. When the engine couldn't make the grade, hundreds of men stepped forward to push his train up the final hill. The president endured everything with amazing fortitude and patience, even remarking near the end, when he learned a fund was being taken up for his family: "How kind and thoughtful! What a generous people!" "General Garfield died from malpractice," Guiteau claimed, defending himself at his spectacle of a trial. This was true, but not enough to save Guiteau from the gallows. MILLARD, whose previous book, "The River of Doubt," was about Theodore Roosevelt's near-fatal journey of exploration in South America, is outstanding on this still darker story. She makes, at times, the common biographer's mistake of inflating her subject's importance and virtues. Contrary to what she implies, neither Garfield's administration nor his death brought about advances in civil rights, nor a grand reconciliation with the South, then busy creating the Jim Crow state. The Garfield aphorisms with which she begins most chapters are often no better than greeting card sentiments. ("If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.") Yet such enthusiasms are understandable concerning such a generally admirable man. Though Garfield's death had little historical significance, Millard has written us a penetrating human tragedy. Control over Garfield's care was seized by a quack with the incredible name of Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. Kevin Baker is writing a social history of New York City baseball.

*Starred Review* What a shame for himself and for the country that the kind, intelligent, and charming president James Garfield did not see his administration through to completion. (He had been in office only four months when, in July 1881, he was shot by a deranged office seeker; in September, he died.) That is the sentiment the reader cannot help but derive from this splendidly insightful, three-way biography of the president; Charles Guiteau, who was Garfield's assassin; and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, whose part in the story was an unsuccessful deathbed attempt to locate the bullet lodged somewhere in the president's body. Garfield, who largely educated himself and rose to be a Civil War general and an Ohio representative in the House, was the dark-horse candidate emergent from the 1880 Republican National Convention. Guiteau, on the other hand, led a troubled life and came to believe it was his divine mission to eliminate Garfield in revenge for the new president's steps against proponents of the spoils system. Bell could have been the hero of the whole sad story, but his technology failed to save the stricken president's life. Millard's book, which follows her deeply compelling The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (2005), stands securely at the crossroads of popular and professional history an intersection as productive of learning for the reader as it undoubtedly was for the author.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist

The shocking shooting and the painful, lingering death of the 20th president."Killed by a disappointed office seeker."Thus most history texts backhand the self-made James Garfield (18311881), notwithstanding his distinguished career as a college professor, lawyer, Civil War general, exceptional orator, congressman and all too briefly president. Millard follows up her impressive debut (The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, 2005) by colorfully unpacking this summary dismissal, demonstrating the power of expert storytelling to wonderfully animate even the simplest facts. As she builds to the president's fatal encounter with his assassin, she details the intra-party struggle among Republicans that led to Garfield's surprise 1880 nomination. The Stalwarts, worshippers of Grant, defenders of the notorious spoils system, battled the Half-Breeds, reformers who took direction from Senators John Sherman and James G. Blaine. The scheming, delusional Charles J. Guiteau, failed author, lawyer and evangelist, listened to no one, except perhaps the voices in his head assuring him he was an important political player, instrumental in Garfield's election and deserving of the consulship to Paris. After repeated rebuffs, he determined that only "removing the president" would allow a grateful Vice President Chester A. Arthur to reward him. During the nearly three excruciating months Garfield lay dying, Alexander Graham Bell desperately scrambled to perfect his induction balance (a metal detector) in time to locate the lead bullet lodged in the stricken president's back. Meanwhile, Garfield's medical team persistently failed to observe British surgeon Joseph Lister's methods of antisepsisthe American medical establishment rejected the idea of invisible germs as ridiculousa neglect that almost surely killed the president. Moving set piecesthe 1876 U.S. Centennial Exhibition which Garfield attended and where both Lister and Bell presented, the deadlocked Republican Convention, the steamship explosion that almost killed Guiteau, the White House death watchand sharply etched sketches of Blaine, the overwhelmed Arthur and larger portraits of the truly impressive Garfield and the thoroughly insane Guiteau make for compulsive reading.Superb American history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

This rendering of an oft-told tale brings to life a moment in the nation's history when access to the president was easy, politics bitter, and medical knowledge slight. James A. Garfield, little recalled today, gained the Republican nomination for president in 1880 as a dark-horse candidate and won. Then, breaking free of the sulfurous factional politics of his party, he governed honorably, if briefly, until shot by an aggrieved office seeker. Under Millard's (The River of Doubt) pen, Garfield's deranged assassin, his incompetent doctors (who, for example, ignored antisepsis, leading to a blood infection), and the bitter politics of the Republican Party come sparklingly alive through deft characterizations. Even Alexander Graham Bell, who hoped that one of his inventions might save the president's life, plays a role. Millard also lays the groundwork for a case that, had Garfield lived, he would have proved an effective and respected chief executive. Today, he would surely have survived, probably little harmed by the bullet that lodged in him, but unimpeded infection took his life. His death didn't greatly harm the nation, and Millard's story doesn't add much to previous understanding, but it's hard to imagine its being better told. Illus. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Significant scholarly attention has long eluded the story of James A. Garfield; however, with this book, former National Geographic writer Millard sheds light on one of history's forgotten presidents. Garfield was assassinated just four months into his presidency; accordingly, his list of accomplishments as president are slim, though his life story before his time in the Oval Office is most compelling and is well documented in this work. The author traces Garfield's hardscrabble upbringing through his evolution into a first-rate scholar and intellectual by his early twenties and remarkable military career during the Civil War. While each segment of Garfield's life is more than adequately handled, the real strengths of this outstanding book are connected to the intrigue that surrounded Garfield's assassination. In this regard, Millard's work really shines as she combs through the long agonizing path toward the grave. The medical treatment James A. Garfield received was as much the element behind his death as the assassin's bullet itself. Readers will appreciate Millard's talent for constructing fluid, eloquent prose throughout a book that does not waste one single word. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. T. Maxwell-Long California State University, San Bernardino

President Garfield's assassination has been studied little when compared with Lincoln's and JFK's, but Millard here reveals in great detail the facts of the crime and the power struggles that followed. She also highlights the hideous medical mistakes that, she asserts, ultimately put Garfield in the ground. Narrator Paul Michael is in good form. (LJ 11/15/11) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.