Lincoln's Final Hours

the long version

"When John Wilkes Booth fired his derringer point-blank into President Abraham Lincoln's head, he set in motion a series of dramatic consequences that would upend the lives of ordinary Washingtonians and Americans alike. In a split second, the story of a nation was changed. During the hours that followed, America's future would hinge on what happened in a cramped back bedroom at Petersen's Boardinghouse, directly across the street from Ford's Theatre. There, a twenty-three-year-old surgeon―fresh out of medical school―struggled to keep the president alive while Mary Todd Lincoln moaned at her husband's bedside. In Lincoln's Final Hours, author Kathryn Canavan takes a magnifying glass to the last moments of the president's life and to the impact his assassination had on a country still reeling from a bloody civil war."--Publisher description.