Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever

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“The man with six weeks to live is anxious.” (O’Reilly 8). Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever, by Bill O'Reilly, is a book worth reading. The book is written in the viewpoint of the narrator in which he knows everything that is going on and will happen. The interest is with the killing of Abraham Lincoln. The readers should know that it is not just about Lincoln. It shows the lives of three other men in history: John Wilkes Booth, Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. The book focused a lot on the Civil War and Generals Grant and Lee for the first part. The North, or the Union, oppose of slavery, while the South, or …show more content…
O’Reilly wrote about the Confederacy’s condition during the four year war and how gruesome it was for the soldiers. “Starvation, literal starvation, was doing its deadly work. So depleted and poisoned was the blood of many of Lee’s men from insufficient and unsound food that a slight wound which would probably not have been reported at the beginning of the war would often cause blood poison, gangrene, and death.” (O’Reilly 57). General Lee finally surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. However, the Confederate soldiers did not give up. During this time, John Wilkes Booth plans a conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln, but then Booth’s rage and hatred towards him makes him want to go a step further and kill Lincoln. He planned to execute Lincoln along with along with others such as General Grant, Andrew Johnson, and William Seward at the Ford’s Theater. One of the most shocking sentence in the book is, “Booth squeezes the trigger.” (O’Reilly 174).

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