Booth

By David M. Robertson

Book Overview

A gripping historical novel in the bestselling tradition of The Alienist and Time and Again, Booth brings vividly to life a figure who continues to haunt the American imagination--John Wilkes Booth. The story begins as an elderly John Surratt, the only conspirator to escape a hanging sentence for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, is asked by film director D.W. Griffith to recount the harrowing events of his youth during the screenings of Griffith's film Birth of a Nation. The request prompts Surratt to reread his detailed diaries, begun in 1864 when he was first befriended by John Wilkes Booth and was unwittingly enmeshed in Booth's plot to assassinate the President. Told through a series of flashbacks, the novel both chronicles the young, naive Surratt's tragic coming of age as he belatedly realizes the nature of the plot Booth has sucked him into, and illuminates the motivations, larger-than-life appetites, and appeal of the charismatic and world-famous stage actor. As Surratt delves further into the diaries and transcripts, it is clear the young Surratt has become trapped in Booth's web of seduction and betrayal. Further insight into the assassination plot is revealed in a surprising twist when the genuine diary that Booth left behind, explaining his actions and implicating others around him, falls into Surratt's hands (a Booth diary, with several missing pages, does exist and is on public display at the Ford Theater in Washington). Compulsively readable, and filled with brilliant period detail--as well as a dozen reproductions of actual photographs of the conspirators and their execution, Booth is a powerful evocation of a dangerous, chaotic, and tragic time in our history, a story that continues to resonate to this day.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038548707X
• ISBN13: 9780385487078
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Excellent. Compelling.

I found this book to be engaging and compelling. It's historical fiction. So for me, I just go along for the ride, pick up some interesting information along the way, and get lost in the story. The pace of the story was good and I felt connected to the characters. Probably one of my favorite books of this type.

Great Book!

I`m no fan of the American Civil War but I found myself transported by this skillfully written novel. Being a movie fan (and Griffith...) I`ve easily been tempted by the subject matter. The pictures, the recreation of the time, even fictionnal, made this one of my favorite books in the last couple of years. Mr Robertson, keep us informed of what you do!!!

Great historical fiction and a great first novel!

An enjoyable book to read, and one that is hard to put down. Robertson admittedly takes some liberties but sticks pretty much to the main facts. Telling the tale through diary accounts, we see the relationship between John Wilkes Booth and the POV character, John Surratt, develop much like that of Steerforth's and David Copperfield's in the Dickens novel. Robertson interestingly enough has the aged Surratt meet with film maker D.W.Griffith and uses this to begin the novel, to great effect. An interesting tale with historical tidbits thrown in, and some insight into early American photography techniques as well. I hope to read many more novels by David Robertson in the future.

Best historical fiction I've read in a good long time!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it really brought the Civil War era to life for me without being so overly romantic and glorified the way too many books on this period are. There were only a few things that bored me, namely John Surratt's involvement with D.W. Griffith (I could have cared less - I hate that time period), all the photographic stuff - again, who cares how old pictures were made?, and the Allen Pinkerton parts, which somehow assumed everyone would know who this person was and his significance to the plot, and who cared how ugly he was? I also could have done without the stuff about Booth sleeping with Mary Surratt. Gross! But all in all, a good read and one I would highly recommend.

An entertaining curiosity

Most (though clearly not all, judging from previous comments here) Civil War and Lincoln buffs will applaud David Robertson's debut novel, which rescues a friend of John Wilkes Booth from obscurity and places him at center stage. Robertson brings to life John H. Surratt, tried as a co-conspirator and acquitted -- two years after his mother was convicted on the same charge and became the first woman to be hanged by the U.S. government. But "Booth" is a book for even readers with no special interest in the Civil War. It opens a fascinating window onto those turbulent times and offers insights -- though, granted, fictional ones -- into a story whose ending everyone already knows.The novel opens with Surratt's 1916 New York Times obituary and then shows us diary entries he had written a few days before. In his initial entry, Surratt reveals that he has been plucked from shipping-clerk obscurity by none other than D.W. Griffith, who wants to put the reminiscences of the long-forgotten historical figure on film for an epilogue to his new movie, "The Birth of a Nation." He considers Griffith's proposal: "Perhaps," he writes, "it was time to tell the full truth about the Lincoln assassination." And with that, the septuagenarian opens up his diaries from the fateful months of 1864-65, offering up the observations and narrations of his younger self.At 21, already a failed playwright, Surratt has just landed a job as a photographer's assistant that both affords him gainful employment and helps him avoid the draft. It was a strong recommendation by his friend Booth (one of the country's most popular actors) that got him the position, and, as he finds out, the favor comes with strings attached. According to Robertson's somewhat defensive five-page essay on his sources, Surratt wasn't actually a photographer, but the author's invention is welcome -- it enlivens both the novel and Surratt's character and allows for some remarkable bits about the Civil War photographer's art: the metal rack that painfully hol! ds subjects' heads and bodies still; the delicate glass-and-chemical work to produce photographic plates; and "the bane of the photographers' art" -- the light-absorbing fabric called bombazine. Surratt's boss complains that "with the fashion in ladies' dress, a pretty maiden of twenty who comes to my studio in her best bombazine outfit becomes . . . a fleshy blob of a face swimming in an inky darkness."The truly fascinating element of the novel, though, is the relationship between Booth and Surratt, who is torn between obligation and independence, struggling for control over "Booth's presence in my life." Robertson's Surratt is a reluctant cipher, a humorless man searching for a cause; it's all too easy to fall under Booth's sway. He's aware of this influence, disturbed by it, fights it. He frets about his place in Booth's shadow even as his friend worries that "he is not the great man onstage" that his father, Junius Booth, was. At times Surratt reflects