{"id":10046,"date":"2016-05-01T11:09:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-01T15:09:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/?p=10046"},"modified":"2016-05-01T11:09:01","modified_gmt":"2016-05-01T15:09:01","slug":"dead-presidents-is-stone-cold-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/2016\/05\/the-bookworm-sez\/dead-presidents-is-stone-cold-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDead Presidents\u201d Is Stone-Cold Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DeadPresidents_978-0-393-24393-2_r1.indd\"<\/a>Someday, you might have your very own stone. Everyone will know it\u2019s yours because your name will be on it, along with a couple of dates. It\u2019ll be yours for a long time, perhaps forever, but sadly, you\u2019ll never see it in its finished form. You\u2019ll just have to trust that it\u2019s the right size for the job or, as in \u201cDead Presidents\u201d by Brady Carlson, you could be memorialized with a stone the size of a South Dakota mountain. Brady Carlson is a curious guy and when his curiosity is piqued, he tends to go all-out in a search for information. Years ago, in grade school, he became interested in U.S. presidents and he noticed that most books are written about \u201cthe lives of our leaders\u201d \u2013 that led him to wonder about their deaths. A few years ago, he finally acted on his inquisitiveness with a cross-country journey to the graves of the presidents and their monuments. Beginning with the Father of our Country, Carlson learned that Washington didn\u2019t want a lot of foofaraw upon his death. He really didn\u2019t want a city to be named after himself, either; one can only imagine how he\u2019d feel about his monument which, by the way, wasn\u2019t finished for nearly 90 years after George died. Every schoolchild knows that John Q. Adams and Thomas Jefferson \u2013 friends, rivals, and signers of the Declaration of Independence \u2013 both died on July 4, 1826. That\u2019s an eerie coincidence, but Carlson says it\u2019s more common than we think. Presidents Ford and Truman both died the day after Christmas (in different years), Abraham Lincoln\u2019s bones sat in a basement \u201cfor almost a decade,\u201d and parts of James Garfield\u2019s skeletal remains are in a museum, remnants of an attempted murder, a trial, and a mishandled injury. One president was exhumed 140 years after he died, one lay in a temporary crypt for \u201ctwo months longer than his entire presidency,\u201d and, surprisingly, just one (so far) rests in peace in Washington. In less than a year, a new person will sit in the Oval Office. What happened to thirty-nine of his (or her) predecessors is the premise behind this peek at presidential passings. You don\u2019t have to look much past the title of \u201cDead Presidents\u201d to know that you\u2019re in for something enjoyably irreverent here, but author Brady Carlson isn\u2019t disrespectful. His fascinating journey was genuine, as evidenced by places he sleuthed, people he met along the way, and the can\u2019t-stop-reading information he found. We learn about grave sites and places where we only think a president rests in peace. We learn how they got there \u2013 sometimes a circuitous route. And we learn how our former leaders are remembered forever. Or not. History buffs will relish this 324-page book, trivia lovers will eat up all of the fun facts, and political fans will (or should) lobby for it. If politics as (un)usual has your ear this year, \u201cDead Presidents\u201d is stone-cold fun. Get it now, wherever books are sold!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someday, you might have your very own stone. Everyone will know it\u2019s yours because your name will be on it, along with a couple of dates. It\u2019ll be yours for a long time, perhaps forever, but sadly, you\u2019ll never see it in its finished form. You\u2019ll just have to trust that it\u2019s the right size<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":10047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10046","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bookworm-sez"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10049,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10046\/revisions\/10049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}