The Book Worm's Library

About the Book: While refurbishing an old ranch building in San Angelo, Texas, the author Preston Darby and his long time friend Ken Casper find the mummified human remains hidden between the walls of the structure. An autopsy reveals the memoirs of John Wilkes Booth secreted in the abdominal cavity. The memoirs disclose the scheme between Booth and his collaborators to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln. But the story also reveals that their plans were discovered by a greater conspiracy of high-ranking Union officials whose plan was much more insidious…to assassinate the President. Reluctantly and in order to save himself, Booth agreed to be the one to pull the trigger, but foils the groups plan to silence him after the deed by escaping. The conspirators incorrectly identify a body as Booth, and promptly hang his accomplices before the true masterminds’ identities can be revealed. Thus, begins the tale of Booth’s years traveling the world, encountering a host of notable characters, and living a secret lie. Book Review:  ★★★★★★ This book provided an entertaining historical fiction tale, with a panorama view of American history, from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, all the way up through 1903. There are many historical figures that…

About the Book: It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would astonish his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk’s secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk’s astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “magnificently” interwoven with “the larger public history of modern America.” Book Review:  ★★★★★★ This is one wild ride of a book.  I first picked it up because the premise sounded so implausible.  And I found myself hooked, almost from the beginning.  Not only is the story…