The Presidential Assassins: John Wilkes Booth, Charles Julius Guiteau, Leon Frank Czolgosz, and Lee Harvey Oswald

By: Jeffrey K. Smith

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

To date, only four American Presidents have been murdered--Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. Were it not for the murderous acts of four men, Ford's Theater, the Baltimore & Potomac Depot, the Temple of Music, and the Texas School Book Depository would have never gained the attention of historians. Presidential assassins, John Wilkes Booth, Charles Julius Guiteau, Leon Frank Czolgosz, and Lee Harvey Oswald left indelible stains on those buildings, as well as the annals of history. On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth fired a derringer into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head while the President was attending a performance at Washington D.C.'s Ford's Theater. Lincoln survived only nine hours; Booth was tracked down and killed 12 days later. Charles Julius Guiteau shot James Garfield in the back with a revolver on July 2, 1881, as the President prepared to board a train at the capitol city's Baltimore & Potomac Depot. Garfield suffered for 80 agonizing days, before succumbing to complications arising from his bullet wound. Guiteau was executed almost a year to the day after he shot Garfield. On September 6, 1901, Leon Frank Czolgosz shot William McKinley twice with his revolver, once in the chest and the other in the abdomen, during a public reception at the Pan-American Exposition's Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York. McKinley lived for eight days; Czolgosz was executed less than two months after the shooting. Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy with an Italian military surplus rifle on November 22, 1963 during a presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas, Texas. Firing from a self-constructed sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald wounded President Kennedy in the neck and head, and seriously injured Texas Governor, John Connally. Kennedy was killed almost instantly from the gunshot wound to his head, even though physicians at Parkland Hospital did not officially pronounce him dead until a half-hour after the shooting. Two days later, Oswald was fatally shot by Jack Ruby, a mentally unstable strip club manager, who sought revenge on behalf of the Kennedy family and a grieving nation. "The Presidential Assassins: John Wilkes Booth, Charles Julius Guiteau, Leon Frank Czolgosz, and Lee Harvey Oswald" recounts the lives of four men, who forever changed history. Did they seek notoriety? Were their violent acts personally or politically motivated? Were they mentally unstable? Those questions and many others are addressed in each of their compelling stories.

Narration cripples a good book

(1) People of Polish descent are not some furniture cleaner.
(2) If Melvin Belli was alive, he’d probably sue the virtual voice for brutally mispronouncing his surname.
(3) There are a lot of odd and lengthy breaks in the narrative. I don’t know if this is because the audio was badly edited, or because the virtual voice program sucks.

Too bad. This is a worthwhile listen.

A thorough and efficient overview of presidential assassinations; but the AI generated voiceover left much to be desired.

The stories contained are well written and well researched. However, the artificial intelligence based voiceover is annoying. Not only is the lack of emotion, or even more unsettling, the misplaced emotion, unsettling, but the continual mispronunciation of keywords made this audiobook much less than it could have been

computer generated narrator completely ruins this

Whoever thought it was okay to have virtual voice read books instead of real people? It's not. The narrating of this book is an abomination, constantly and irritatingly mispronouncing words, not being able to recognize homonyms making the context laughable, switching the pronunciation of names back and forth sometimes in the same paragraph. Anything worthy from this book would be completely nullified by the narration. While the book did contain some new information and interesting anecdotes, editing was sorely needed as quite often the exact same thing was repeated several times in the book. There was also quite a bit of presumption engaged in by the author in this supposedly non-fiction work, For example, exactly what Officer Tippett was thinking right before he was killed by Oswald. I would not recommend this book, especially if it is only available in virtual voice.