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Write 6 pages with APA style on Analysis of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard. [ii] The book is structured in twenty-two short chapters, along with a prologue and epilogue. These are arranged in turn into four numbered sections. Each chapter starts with a little quotation which is taken from James A. Garfield himself, and which gives the book an old-fashioned feel as if there is going to be some moral implied in the narrative that follows. The titles and opening lines of the chapters have a deliberately dramatic tone, as for example in chapter one, which begins with the words “Even severed as it was from the rest of the body, the hand was majestic. Sixteen feet tall, with long, tapered fingers….” (p. 7) It turns out that the hand in question belongs to the as yet un-erected statue of liberty, and the symbolism is evidently intended.

The prologue of the book is rather unusual because it starts with a description of Charles Guiteau, the man who would ultimately assassinate James A. Garfield. He is immediately described as a failure at everything he has touched, and he is compared with Garfield, almost as a mirror image of that man’s success: “Like Guiteau, Garfield had started out with very little in life, but where Guiteau had found failure and frustration.” (p. 1). This shadowy figure lurks in the background, therefore, from the very start of the book, giving a certain impression of inevitability about what transpires, as if it was all prefigured from the beginning, with the heroic Garfield being tracked by his nemesis all along.

Following this rather odd prologue, the first part of the book follows a fairly standard biography pattern, narrating the childhood and adolescence of its subject, with reference to his father’s hard life and early death when James Garfield was only 2 years old, and the struggle of his mother to bring up her children in a dignified kind of poverty. James was the lucky one, unlike his elder brother, and he received all that the family could afford in the way of educational opportunities.