What I've Read: Manhunt

I once read an article or watched a movie in which someone said something to the effect of, "I don't have time for fiction, history is thrilling enough." Now, I am not going to be so bold as that, but I have found that over the last few years I am more and more left fiction to the side and focused almost exclusively on nonfiction books. And to my surprise, I love it more and more as I read it.

The wife recently went on a book run for a trip, and when I asked her to pick me something up, she got Manhunt as the "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" deal. She normally avoids Civil War topics like the plague (bad life experiences for another story at another time) and so I gladly snatched it from her. First off, the book was based primarily in DC, and second, it was all about the frantic hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices after the assassination of President Lincoln. Being an unabashed fan of nonfiction written like a thriller, I was instantly enamored with the book.

Besides recommending it for those with a love of history with lots of theatrics and twists and turns, the book's indelible mark left on me was it's subtle commentary of history keeping. I was amazed at how much detail Swanson was able to unearth about the time and the manhunt, primarily because everyone kept letters and journals and whatnot. Might seem trivial at first read, but the idea that we live in a society in which everyone e-mails, texts, twitters, blogs and makes phone calls.

I wonder if anything beyond books and newspapers will stand a hundred years from now to record events in people's lives. We don't live in a world where everyone keeps things and remembrances of the happenings in their lives, and if the day comes when someone wants to build family trees or get to know what their great-grandfather was like in the year 2009, what tools they will use unearth the facts and opinions of that person if they were not written about in a major publication. I guess it makes me also consider that this blog might be one of the only existing memories of my life decades from now. Maybe this is way too serious/existential/deep/whatever of a question for me to answer right now, but Manhunt gave me both a wonderful education into the lives of a great president and the men who conspired and killed him. But it also made me consider how we record the events of our lives in this age where newspapers are dying, celebrated memoirs are found to be falsified and too many people facebook or twitter about what they are eating at a given moment.

I'll be thinking of this as I continue eating my bagel. Just so you know.