New book: "How a Nation Grieves: Press Accounts..."

[Glenn Cheney]

Hello, everyone. For those of you who have read all the other 16,000 books about Lincoln, I'd like to suggest a new book, one that's a little different. The title is "How a Nation Grieves: Press Accounts of the Death of Lincoln, the Hunt for Booth, and America in Mourning." I'm the author. the foreword is by U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney.

This book isn't about Lincoln as much as the emotional state of the nation at its most traumatic juncture. As you read the reports and editorials, you witness the zeitgeist much as everyone else did -- through newspapers that had to use words to do what photography and television would later do with graphic images.

And the writing is beautiful, often with an elegance approaching the poetic. In fact, I started each chapter (each chapter containing the reports of a given day) with some lines taken from a report but broken into lines that render them poetry.

You can read an excerpt at cheneybooks.com . I'd love to hear comments about the presentation of the book and, more important, the quality of journalism in those days.

Glenn Alan Cheney
Hanover, Conn.