What a way to go: Sarah Vowell's morbidly funny tour of presidential assassination sites.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Assassination Vacation - Book Review

Assassination Vacation

By Sarah Vowell Simon & Schuster, $21.00

About halfway through Assassination Vacation, Sarah Voweli's account of her visits to numerous and various sites associated with America's first three presidential assassinations, she talks about taking a self-guided tour of James Garfield's Washington. "The prospect is more titillating than one might think," she says, as though the opposite was even possible. Since most of the sites are unmarked or have been torn down, she says she feels she knows secrets, and this pleases her. "It's just a small, pleasant buzz to amble around and watch the city come alive with forgotten men."

A lot of forgotten men get brought up in this book, and reading does instill a feeling that is small and pleasant (though if a buzz is what you're after, you're more apt to be successful just by overdoing the Robitussin a bit.) Vowell, who is a contributing editor to public radio's "This American Life," has written for McSweeney's and other publications, and supplied the voice of teenage superhero Violet Parr in Pixar's The Incredibles, is a good companion for a journey of this sort.

She neither apologizes nor justifies this odd interest of hers, can from time to time turn a phrase (the McKinley National Monument in Ohio looks like "a gray granite nipple on a fresh green breast of grass") and has a nice sense of humor both about herself and the scenes she encounters. At one point Vowell notes that John Wilkes Booth's fame as an actor enabled him to move freely between the North and South, an ability that the Confederate Secret Service was able to exploit. "There is a lesson here for the terrorists of the world: If they really want to get ahead, they should put less energy into training illiterate 10-year-olds how to fire Kalashnikovs and start recruiting celebrities like George Clooney. I bet nobody's inspected that man's luggage since the second season of 'ER.'"

Vowell is very well-read on these murders and displays a knowledge of the surroundings and supporting players that marks the true fan. More importantly, she has pretty good taste, and one senses her taking almost personal pride and satisfaction in her selection and presentation of certain anecdotes, as though she had brought them out just for you. I was delighted to see that amid a sea of Lincoln arcana, Vowell chooses to devote the better part of a page to the last line in "Our American cousin" that was delivered just before Booth pulled the...