The Life and Times of John Wilkes Booth

[L Verge]

I don't know how long Bill Edwards has been working as a historian in the Lincoln assassination field. I believe that we first heard of him when he and Ed Steers produced that mammoth and expensive The Evidence book, which is a wonderful research tool. Mr. Edwards claims in this book to have found new insights and details to share. My routine skimming has not found them, but perhaps Bill Binzel's careful reading has.

Art Loux, a dear friend of many of us, spent nye on to 40 years working on John Wilkes Booth: Day by Day with the dedicated eye of a fine historian (albeit one of the "amateurs" that professionals used to look down on). When he died in 2013, he had a contract with McFarland, and his daughter, Jennifer, took over the reins of steering it through the final publication. IMO, Art's book is a professional tome from start to finish. If Bill Edwards thought that it would not get published, perhaps that spurred him to work on his rendition -- self-published and less expensive (and it shows).

My observation is that it is complicated (yes) to transcribe all those documents in the NARA files, but that is what The Evidence is -- a transcription, not a personal piece of interpreting historical data. It appears that The Life and Times of John Wilkes Booth is an amateurish attempt to compete with the more scholarly ...Day by Day?