Reader's Digest Condensed Books Volume 4 1992 Author:Reader's Digest Editors This book contains the following stories: — Such Devoted Sisters by Eileen Goudge — Rules of Encounter by William P. Kennedy — The Love Child by Catherine Cookson — American Gothic by Gene Smith — From the back cover: — "The Mystery That Won't Go Away — Few episodes in American history continue to fascinate as does the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.... more » Even today, a hundred and twenty-seven years later, mysteries surround the event. What provoked John Wilkes Booth - a gifted, popular actor - to commit his desperate, infamous act? What was the meaning of his final words - "Useless, useless"? Gene Smith's American Gothic, beginning on page 477 of this volume, brings the historian's penetrating eye to this tragedy, and to the lives of the eccentric, charming, and strangely haunted members of the Booth family.
One sign of the event's continuing interest is the thousands of people who each year come to Washington, D.C., to retrace the steps of the conspirators. They go to Mary Surratt's boarding-house, where the plot was hatched. They stand in Ford's Theatre, staring in mute wonder at the stage onto which Booth leaped, crying, "Sic semper tyrannis," after delivering his fatal shot. On what is now Highway 301 they can see the stone monument that marks the place where Booth died, shot by a Union soldier.
Or was he? Many people contend that he eluded his pursuers and actually died thirty-eight years later, after living a quiet, unobtrusive life in Enid, Oklahoma. If so, then who lies buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Maryland?
The mysteries persist. What is the true story? What is fiction and rumor? Read American Gothic and decide for yourself. - The Editors"« less
I liked American Gothic and Rules of Encounter the best. I loved learning about John Wilkes Booth and his family in American Gothic. I didn't know the conspiracy theory behind the sinking of the Lusitania until I read Rules of Encounter.