Destiny of the Republic

James A. Garfield rose from deep poverty to become a scholar, a Civil War hero and a reform-minded congressman before he was nominated for president against his will. Candice Millard tells his story alongside that of Charles Guiteau, the unstable office seeker who shot him in the back four months after his 1881 inauguration. Garfield survived the shooting, and Millard follows the struggle over his administration and his medical care that came next, as his physicians applied outdated treatments. She also recounts how Alexander Graham Bell worked around the clock on a device to locate the bullet. The book received the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime the year after its 2011 publication.

Morgan Housel described it as the story of Garfield's assassination and of the doctors who tried to save him without believing in germs, which he said probably killed him in the end, and Ryan Holiday said he would read whatever else Millard writes.