Nora TitoneCritiques

This book which posits sibling rivalry as an assassination motive, as well as "John Wilkes Booth and the Women Who Loved Him" which attributes syphlitic insanity, remind me that if authors accepted the simplest, most obvious explanation then they likely would never be published.

Even the existence of an inconsequential sibling rivalry struck me as specious. Edwin was the older brother and therefore bound to be more accomplished which sets a high threshold to prove resentment by a younger brother. The author ignores what is obvious from a cursory glance at the photographic record, namely that John was handsome and Edwin was not, a weighty determinative factor for career success as a leading man in the theatre. Nor does it appear that the brothers ever competed in auditions for the same role or even in the same play or theatre. And finally rivalry runs counter to the facts of the fraternal relationship.

Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was only the culmination of a family rivalry that spanned decades in “My Thoughts Be Bloody,” a book about John Wilkes and Edwin Booth.

It’s fascinating to read a book about an event we all know and see coming, and to realize what a long road it took to get there. The assassination almost feels like an aside, the last great act in a family of actors used to taking the big stage.

The book starts with the paterfamilias, Junius Brutus Booth, the greatest British actor of his era, maybe the greatest actor period. He was an alcoholic who left behind a wife and children and set off for America, there finding a new love and fathering many children.

The family secret was they were all illegitimate, as his wasn’t actually married to his American “wife.”

Booth père left to tour Shakespeare, and had more affairs along the way. Eventually, one of the youngest children, Edwin, went with him to help keep him off the bottle and on point. Doing so, he absorbed the family talent – while little brother John Wilkes stayed home with mother.

Edwin eventually takes father’s place as the leader of the family and the talent, even as older brother Junius Jr. (called June) and John Wilkes tried their hand at acting. Short story, neither was as talented as their brother, and John in particular felt a rivalry that grew increasingly bitter.

The book covers many years in the Booth family story, with a full picture of the psychology and mentality of the players leading up to John’s puzzling affinity for the Rebel cause.

There are plenty of twists and turns here, all of them fascinating, and the family story is good enough without the end we know is coming – which only takes part of a chapter, at that.

Highly recommended.

See more of my reviews at Ralphsbooks.½

A group biography, dealing with two generations of the Booth family. They were very prominent in the American Theatre of the Nineteenth Century. Junius Brutus Booth was a rising actor in England but ran off to the USA with a flower girl and theatrical costumer leaving a wife and a son behind in London. He rose through the pack in the country he had chosen and soon, and for most of his life, was the most famous actor in the USA. Two of his sons struggled to become the most prominent Booth on the stage in their generation.
Edwin succeeded in the profession. John Wilkes became infamous for one act in a theatre. The book has many interesting details from the theatrical life of the time, and some of the peripheral subjects lead interesting lives as well. A very good piece of anecdotal history.½

This is the story of the entire Booth family and the state of theater in mid-1800s America, not just John Wilkes Booth. All of the above were fascinating as told by this author, with great revealing excerpts from theater reviews, friends, letters, etc.

The audio was excellently read, but you'll want the book to see the photos.

A thorough examination of the relationship between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth that exposes the dynamic and competitiveness that led to John Wilkes assassination of President Lincoln. I was amazed at how important Edwin Booth was to the history of acting and for his influence on art and politics, as well as the unfortunate behaviors of his younger brother. The ultimate story of sibling rivalry, "My Thoughts be Bloody" is a must read for any lover of American history.

An in depth study of the family of John Wilkes Booth the assassin of Lincoln. The premise of the story is that the rivalry that developed between John and Edwin, one of John's older brothers lead to the assassionation. Their rivalry seemed to be all-pervasive, On the stage, in the family and politically. At times very redundant I liked this book because it filled in an aspect of Lincoln's life I had not know before.

I was reluctant to read this biography of the Booth family, but quickly became fascinated by the back story of republican (small "r") idealism, class barriers, family fortunes and sibling rivalry. Who knew, for example, that John Wilkes Booth speculated in the oil fields of Pennsylvania and, after that failed, used his investments as a cover for his work on behalf of the Confederacy? or that his older brother was the most famous actor of the nineteenth century?

So, why only three stars? I felt cheated that about 40 per cent of the book is footnotes and other apparatus. I wanted to know more about the Booth family, not more about the research that underpins this fascinating family biography.

Titone does a great job at telling a true story about Shakespearean actors which in itself would be a worthy subject for one of the Bard's plays. She deconstructs the sibling rivalry between John Wilkes Booth and his brother Edwin. Edwin was the DeNiro of his day, both in looks and in his influential and realistic style of acting. John Wilkes was a ham-handed hack as an actor, although he had the matinee-idol good looks and and skill at stage combat that made him a lesser star.

Of course, aiding them in achieving fame was their family name: Booth. They were the sons of the great Shakespearean star Junius Brutus Booth, who left his native England (where he was revered as the greatest actor of his time) to seek fame in the United States. His motives were the desire to conquer new territory, an admiration of the American Founding Fathers, and a desire to escape an ill-considered marriage and live with his true love, Mary Ann. Junius's life, with its aura of dark romanticism, could be considered Byronic, which is apt also because Lord Byron was a friend and mentor to young Junius, and also an idol of his young paramour, Mary Ann.

Junius was an iconoclast, a heretic, and an alcoholic, and was a misfit in the puritanical country he'd adopted. As with many showman who traveled for long stretches to make their bread in the nineteenth century (Mark Twain was another), death from viral epidemics decimated his family during a long absence, resulting in dark and tragic scenes of grieving. These dark hours overshadow and dominate the later lives of Edwin and John Wilkes, almost as though a family curse is visited upon the subsequent generations for the sins of the father. The end result, the death of Lincoln, we all know. What few today know is the story of how Edwin escaped being tarred with the same brush as Brother John, and how he rehabilitated the family name (at least during his own lifetime).

I would have liked to have read more about the conspiracy of which John Wilkes was a part, but Titone's book glossed over that in favor of telling the story of the Booth family. But that's fine. The tragic, operatic tale of the Booth family is the story she intended to tell, and told well. The reader probably shouldn't expect more.

John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, is widely known to have been an actor. In countless books, Booth's career has informed the retelling of the assassination and the surrounding conspiracy. As an actor, Booth had a knowledge of the theater, which allowed him to plan his access to Lincoln, the timing of his act, and his escape. More than this, though, there was a theatrical spectacle in the act, from the ambitious nature of the conspiracy to decapitate the government to Booth dramatically leaping from the president's box to the stage and uttering an exit line as he crossed the stage.

Despite his career as an actor and his relationship to the most famous acting family in 19th Century America, this aspect of Booth's life has been less explored by historians of Lincoln's assassination. Nora Titone's recent joint biography of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth, "My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln," is an important corrective. Chronicling the life of the acting family sired (out of wedlock) by Junius Booth, it begins with the extramarital relationship that forced the senior actor to flee his native England for the United States and then documents the family's up and down fortunes until 1865, when John Wilkes would ignominiously establish the family name in history.

The well-researched and beautifully written book is rather uninterested in the mechanics of the conspiracy and assassination. Instead, and most helpfully, it offers a vivid presentation of two significant contexts for John Wilkes Booth's life and character: the theater profession and his family dynamics.

Through the Booths, Titone explores the travails of being an actor in early 19th Century America. As a whole, actors and theater workers had a poor reputation as lower class people with very questionable morals. Further, it was a risky business financially. For backstage workers and company actors, the pay was measly, and even for established actors, earnings were directly tied to ticket sales. To earn enough to support a family generally required extensive touring and mounting multiple different productions in each city, which led Junius Booth and then his sons to be away from home for extended periods of time.

As a young teenager, Edwin Booth began accompanying his father on tour, mostly to ensure that the famous actor was not drinking too much or gambling and losing his earnings. Thus began Edwin's apprenticeship, watching his father perform famous roles again and again, and then taking ever more important parts in these performances. After the untimely death of Junius Booth, Edwin became the main breadwinner in the family as an actor, eventually establishing himself in New York City.

While Edwin Booth seemed to have received or learned his father's substantial theatrical gifts, it was the impulsive younger brother John Wilkes Booth who inherited his father's smoldering good looks. Trading on his close resemblance to his father and on the Booth family name, John Wilkes worked hard to break into acting, with initially frustrating results. Even as he depended on his brother Edwin's financial support, he chafed under his brother's refusals to help advance his career, which apparently stemmed from a combination of sibling rivalry, a fear of professional competition, and a recognition that John Wilkes was not very talented as an actor.

After the early years where Junius struggled to establish himself in the American theater, the narrative alternatively focuses on Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth. Seemingly required to grow up more quickly, Edwin always seems the more complete figure, while an increasingly frustrated John Wilkes moved around the edges of Edwin's orbit. While this likely is a reasonable assessment of the relationship between the two brothers and their very different professional experiences as actors, it also betrays that Titone's interest here lies mostly with Edwin, certainly an intriguing and attractive biographical figure in his own right. This leads to a fascinating dismissive tone toward John Wilkes Booth from both older brother Edwin and historian Titone.

As a result, not all of the psychological motivations of the assassin are fully explored here. John Wilkes Booth's political sensibilities seem to form haltingly towards supporting the Confederacy, partially in rebellion to Edwin's support of the Union, but his interaction with the Confederate Secret Service is barely mentioned. Neither is there much attention to the other conspirators, though I must confess that Titone's assessment of Booth achieves a breakthrough -- here the assassin seems to have a personality compatible with the almost comical misfits assembled for the plot (with the exception of John Surratt, who has always seemed the smartest of the bunch to me).

Instead, what emerges is the story of the petulant, overgrown teenager who wants to prove he is his own man, whether in pursuing acting in a rather haphazard way or in aggressively -- and imprudently -- voicing his political views. Driven to desperate lengths to make his name, this man eventually assassinates Abraham Lincoln. This portrait of immaturity and petulance largely matches the personality quirks that John Wilkes Booth displayed during the 12 days after the assassination, as he tried to escape. It does not, though, offer sufficient insight into Booth's association with the Confederate Secret Service, or more importantly, their willingness to associate with him and trust him as an operative -- and there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest this is an important part of the story, as Edward Steers and others have argued.

Still, there is much here to recommend. Despite the depth of research, the book is not dry or cumbersome. Instead, it offers a compelling narrative more similar to a novel. If it leaves significant questions about Booth's motives for assassinating Lincoln, it expertly demystifies key parts of his personality and life. Instead of an actor playing a part (badly), here is a more nuanced and fleshed-out portrait of the man who would be Brutus.

This review is also published at http://lincolniana.blogspot.com/2013/02/book-review-my-thoughts-be-bloody.html

This was an interesting book. It delved into the lives of John Wilkes Booth, his father, his brother, and the rest of his family. It outlines the contentions between the successful Edwin Booth and the unssuccessful John Wilkes Booth. Rather than a memoir on the life of John Wilkes Both, it was an expose on the entire Booth family. It is interesting, and a good read. I would reccommend it to anyone interested in John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln, or the Civil War.

The subtitle of the paperback edition is “The Bitter Rivalry that Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.” This book is simultaneously a history of the Booth family -- including the father, Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and his sons, actors Edwin, John Wilkes, and Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. – a history of the theatre in America during the first half of the 19th century, and a social and political history of the United States during this time period. Junius Booth and Mary Ann Holmes had ten illegitimate children including all the sons mentioned above; they did not marry until after Junius finally divorced his wife, Adelaide, only a year or so before his death.

The story of the Booth family was heavily influenced by their social condition and by the life of an actor, Junius, who was away on tour much of the time. His son, Edwin, who would become the best American Shakespearean actor of his generation, even surpassing his father, traveled with Junius from a young age, trying to keep his father sober and able to act. He learned stagecraft from his father. The rest of the family also had a tough life. There was a lot of rivalry between the sons, especially Edwin and John Wilkes, who both wanted to become known as the dramatic heir of Junius; there was also rivalry with other actors. The book is rich in describing their lives and the relationships of many people, both in the theater and outside it.

The book also describes some events leading up to the Civil War including John Brown’s raid. Brown was financially supported by the abolitionist, Samuel Gridley Howe. Howe and his wife, Julia Ward Howe, were closely associated with Edwin Booth. John Wilkes Booth was the only member of his family with Southern sympathies; evidence is displayed that John Wilkes was even involved in the Confederate Secret Service.

John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln is described. However, the emphasis is on how Lincoln was cared for by the actress Laura Keene and reactions in Ford’s Theatre to the assassination rather than tracing John Wilkes’ escape immediately following the event. Any conspiracy is not discussed. The reaction of the Booth family is described. Several of the Booth siblings were arrested and jailed although Edwin, with his strong ties to the Union and his support network in the North was not. The later lives of the main characters in the story are briefly summarized at the end of the book, which begins with a salute to Edwin shortly before his death in the 1890s.

A family tree somewhere in the book would have been helpful.½