Fortune's Fool

I received a copy of Fortune's Fool via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This is my eleventh review for Sophie and Suze's NetGalley Challenge.

Abraham Lincoln is such a global cultural icon that he is one of the few American presidents that I can recognise instantly, by face as well as name. Whether he would be so memorable now if he had not been assassinated when he was, before his career suffered some inevitable decline, is an interesting thought. And would anyone remember John Wilkes Booth as an actor, rather than an assassin?

Prior to reading Fortune's Fool I was aware of Booth's name and defining action, but knew nothing more about him. I think I now have a good overview of his life and understanding of his beliefs, bizarre though they are to modern sensibilities. Alford has obviously spent hours and hours researching his book and seems to have uncovered practically every public mention of Booth during his acting career. As the son of a famous thespian father, notices appear frequently, but therein lies my main problem with this book. By including so much minutiae, I found the pace very slow, and there are rarely great insights so Alford often has to make great leaps.

Booth was not a prolific writer so little remains of his own words and, while later interviews with friends and family have interest, it is impossible to tell how coloured their views are by What Happened. I still don't really know what turned an aspiring actor to a crazy fanatic. That he believed slaves were less than human and 'deserved' to be owned is obviously proven, but how he came to view Lincoln as a tyrant and dictator is unclear, especially as most of his time in the years prior to the assassination were spent in the North, rather than amongst similarly entrenched bigotry in the South.

A drier read than I usually like, Fortune's Fool did take me a long time to get through. It is interesting in short bursts, but then I kept forgetting who everyone was. And the information is too dense to read for hours at a time! The biography has led me to want to understand more about Booth and this period of American history though because I am left with more questions than answers.