President Garfield, CW Goodyear
President Garfield, CW Goodyear
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President Garfield
From Radical to Unifier

Author: CW Goodyear

Narrator: Fred Sanders

Unabridged: 17 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/04/2023


Synopsis

An “ambitious, thorough, supremely researched” (The Washington Post) biography of the extraordinary, tragic life of America’s twentieth president—James Garfield.

In “the most comprehensive Garfield biography in almost fifty years” (The Wall Street Journal), C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixed and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more.

Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era—Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—Garfield served as a peacemaker in a Republican Party and America defined by divisions. He was elected to overcome them. He was killed while trying to do so.

President Garfield is American history at its finest. It is about an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.

About CW Goodyear

C.W. Goodyear is an author and historian based in Washington, DC. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up abroad before graduating from Yale University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David

A President Known Better for his Death than His Life In August 1981, I was running a Sunday magazine for a suburban newspaper in Michigan where we occasionally ran a column under the banner: "Just a Century Ago ..." I was fascinated by the fact that our newspaper had, at that point long before the In......more

Goodreads review by Casey

This was the first biography of President James Garfield that I have read and found it to be well written and researched. It is divided into sections of his early life, time in Congress and his two years as President. He is best remembered as the second president to be assassinated, but actually acc......more

Goodreads review by Adam

This is an excellent addition to Garfield historiography. Garfield has largely been overlooked in the annals of the presidency, a member of a relatively uninspiring run of chief executives and one who died early. There have been some rumblings about him--he once showed flashes of reform-mindedness a......more