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xterminal's review
4.0
Graeme Donald, The Man Who Shot the Man Who Shot Lincoln (Osprey Publishing, 2010)
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
I have an acquaintance who's always singing the praises of Osprey Publishing's military books, so when one showed up on Vine, I grabbed it immediately. I grant you, from the descriptions I've read of other Osprey books, this one is an outlier; it's about three times as long as the stuff I keep getting recommended me. I found it enjoyable enough, in that “collection of useless trivia you read simply because you hunger for useless trivia” kind of way. Forty-seven short essays about forgotten or neglected witnesses to (or architects of, in the case of, say, Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was as it turns out a monstrous case of blind, stupid luck) history, most of them amusing, albeit grimly so. Not a definitive, be-all-end-all kind of resource, but trivia hounds will find it most edifying, and Donald's storytelling style will keep you turning the pages past your bedtime. *** ½
Full disclosure: this book was provided to me free of charge by Amazon Vine.
I have an acquaintance who's always singing the praises of Osprey Publishing's military books, so when one showed up on Vine, I grabbed it immediately. I grant you, from the descriptions I've read of other Osprey books, this one is an outlier; it's about three times as long as the stuff I keep getting recommended me. I found it enjoyable enough, in that “collection of useless trivia you read simply because you hunger for useless trivia” kind of way. Forty-seven short essays about forgotten or neglected witnesses to (or architects of, in the case of, say, Gavrilo Princip, whose assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was as it turns out a monstrous case of blind, stupid luck) history, most of them amusing, albeit grimly so. Not a definitive, be-all-end-all kind of resource, but trivia hounds will find it most edifying, and Donald's storytelling style will keep you turning the pages past your bedtime. *** ½
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