The History & Biography Group will discuss President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C. W. Goodyear. Garfield’s life becomes a fascinating national portrait of an imperfect union struggling across its first century to live up to the promise of its founding. The book is not just a careful study of Garfield but a portrait of a nation in transition—from its wild youth, where Garfield begins life in a log cabin—through its awkward and violent adolescence with the Civil War, and onward as it heaves through Reconstruction and the Gilded Age toward adulthood as an industrialized economic empire.