Shooting Lincoln ─ Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century

Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner were the new media moguls of their day. Together they brought the Civil War and all of its terrible suffering into Northern living rooms. Newspapers sold out when they ran their photos, and, by the end of the war, they were locked in fierce competition. When the biggest story of the century?Lincoln's assassination?broke, their paparazzi-like race intensified. Whoever could take the most sensational?or ghastly?photo would achieve lasting fame.

Shooting Lincoln tells the astonishing behind-the-photograph story of these two media pioneers who raced to "shoot" Lincoln in the days after he died and the assassins on the day they died. The photos they took electrified the country, unlocking the passion of Americans for close-up views of history as it happened.

Nicholas Pistor is a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a former consultant for CBS's 48 Hours true-crime series. He's appeared on nearly every major television news network, including NBC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. His first book, The Ax Murders of Saxtown: The Unsolved Crime That Terrorized a Town and Shocked a Nation, was cited by the Kansas City Star as one of its "Best Books of 2014." Pistor lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

www.nickpistor.com