A new series that can be considered recent best books for kids describe the violent deaths of three famous people. Fox News TV personality Bill O’Reilly has won some measure of fame for three books which describe how Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus met their violent ends. He has thoughtfully provided versions of each of these books for younger readers.
Lincoln’s Last Days describes the events and characters surrounding that night in April, 1865, when an actor and Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth ended President Lincoln’s life by sneaking up behind him in his box at Ford’s Theater and shooting him in the back of the head. Lincoln, who had just won the Civil War, was settling down to his second term in which he anticipated trying to bind the wounds of the Union and to establish one country again. Booth did not, as he had hoped, save southern independence with his singular act, but he did rob the country of a great man and president.
Kennedy’s Last Days focuses on that morning in Dallas, Texas when a crazed gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy to death while he was riding through the city in an open car. O’Reilly in this case does not delve in conspiracy theories; he accepts that Oswald did it and that he was the lone gunman.
Jesus’ Last Days is perhaps the most controversial of the three books as it deals with an iconic figure who founded a world religion. O’Reilly stays away from some of the most religious aspects of the death of Jesus but places the event in a historical context in a world dominated by the often brutal rule of the Roman Empire.
