Assassination Vacation

Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation invokes a number of genres, including history and personal narrative. However, it still fits neatly into a broader trend of historical non-fiction written for a broad audience by writers with a journalism or essayist background, instead of academic historians. Popular examples of this type of non-fiction include Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2021) by Ty Seidule, in which Seidule reflects on his own personal history and understanding of the Civil War and its legacy, and Bill Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019), in which Bryson attempts to make human anatomy and bodily functioning accessible to lay readers.

Academic histories, whether written for fellow experts or for the general public, tend to strive for a detached, neutral narrative, with academic historians placing a high value on objectivity and providing comprehensive, verifiable information. By contrast, popular historical non-fiction often favors more informal narrative styles, which can feature slang and idiomatic writing, humor, and openly subjective interpretations of historical figures and events. Instead of aiming for a comprehensive picture of the subject matter or a specific argument like professional historians often attempt, these writers have a looser approach, driven by their own interests and by historical anecdotes and trivia rather than aiming for an authoritative account.

Such popular histories have been praised by some critics for being entertaining and for presenting history to a wider audience. For example, a review of The Devil in the White City praised the book for “taking what should be a dry history lesson and turning it into something you tear through like a thriller” (Clark, Aimee. “The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.” City of Spencer Library, 25 April 2025). At the same time, other reviews of books like The Devil in the White City and Assassination Vacation have criticized them for their lack of professional historical rigor and meandering narratives. In his review of Assassination Vacation, Bruce Handy remarks, “Vowell, for her part, pretty much throws up her hands when it comes to Larger Meaning” (Handy, Bruce. “‘Assassination Vacation’: Dead Presidents.” The New York Times, 8 May 2005). 

More generally, critics have also raised concerns that the publishing industry has provided more opportunities for established writers rather than professional historians to publish non-fiction books marketed for wide audiences. These questions have fed into intense debates over who is “qualified” to write published histories.