RaveThe Providence JournalToday, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman and John Wilkes Booth have become more symbols than human beings. But in Every Drop of Blood, they are living people, crammed in corridors and parlors and conniving and gossiping at parties ... While its backdrop is a monumental event, the book never loses sight of the people whose stories it tells ... Washington, D.C., itself is a character, grand with its new domed Capitol and at the same time vulgar, with a canal of stinking sewage nearby. Achorn knows the city so well that even the statues have stories he can tell ... Achorn is clearly a longtime student of the era. The bibliography is 16 pages long, and the book reflects that level of scholarship. So many of the characters we meet are quoted exactly from letters and diaries. Original sourcing not only provides credibility, it lets us hear these people in their own voices, not transcribed or filtered through a 21st-century sensibility ... a good read in our own era, reminding us that no matter how badly divided we feel now, as a nation we’ve been through worse. It reminds us that even in those terrible times, our country produced an underestimated man who was able to rise above them. And it offers hope that another underestimated leader among us now may be able to do the same
