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In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits
Bottom of the pile
8
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
7/100Critics
10/100Scholars
Author:
Terry Alford
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
June 14, 2022
The story of Abraham Lincoln as it has never been told before: through the strange, even otherworldly, points of contact between his family and that of the man who killed him, John Wilkes Booth.
What The Reviewers Say
In the Houses of Their Dead explores both the Lincolns’ and the Booths’ enthrallment with spiritualism, the belief that living people can communicate with deceased people’s spirits...Members of both families were shattered time after time by a litany of heartbreaking, often torturous illnesses and deaths, which inspired a desire to communicate with their dead loved ones...Alford seamlessly tells the two families’ stories, starting with the major players’ childhoods and continuing until their deaths—and after...Alford sets the historical stage well, allowing readers to understand the emotional underpinnings of Lincoln’s assassination, which he memorably describes..
... a well-sourced if slight piece of sideways biography that often strains to justify its thesis, but makes a lively study of two wildly disparate clans nonetheless.
Alford, having written a definitive biography of Booth, knows the territory. He explores Lincoln’s own religious sensibilities, which ran deep but were unmoored to any particular creed.
... entertaining.
