Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President.
MILLARD, Candice.
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President.
“If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old": First Edition of Destiny of the Republic; Signed by Candice Millard
New York: Doubleday, 2011.
$475.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152148
First edition of this Edgar Award-winning narrative history reconstructing the assassination of President James A. Garfield. Octavo, original publisher’s half cloth, illustrated. Boldly signed by Candice Millard on the title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by John Fontana.
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (2011) is the second book by Candice Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic magazine and one of the most accomplished practitioners of narrative popular history in America today, and the work that cemented her reputation as a storyteller capable of recovering forgotten chapters of American history with the propulsive momentum and intimate human focus of the finest literary nonfiction. The book reconstructs the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881, tracing three interlocking narratives: the extraordinary life of Garfield himself, born into abject poverty and rising through the Civil War and the halls of Congress to a reluctant presidential candidacy that challenged the corrupt spoils system of the Gilded Age; the mounting madness of his assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker who shot Garfield in a Washington train station four months after his inauguration; and the harrowing medical catastrophe that followed, in which a cadre of well-meaning but dangerously incompetent physicians, ignoring Joseph Lister's revolutionary antiseptic principles, effectively killed the President over the course of eleven weeks through repeated unsterilized probing of his wound, while Alexander Graham Bell raced to develop a metal-detection device that might locate the bullet. The book rose to number five on the New York Times bestseller list and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, while it won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, the PEN Center USA Award for Research Nonfiction, the One Book-One Lincoln Award, the Ohioana Award, and the Kansas Notable Book Award. It was adapted in 2025 as the Netflix series Death by Lightning starring Matthew Macfadyen, Michael Shannon, and Nick Offerman.
