Bill O’Reilly defended his history book “Killing Lincoln” on Monday after a National Park Service review last week said it contained factual errors and lack of documentation. The Fox News host said the bestseller was “under some fire from the forces of darkness.” 
 
 Speaking on “The O’Reilly Factor,” he acknowledged that “Killing Lincoln” contained “four minor misstatements, all of which have been corrected.” He added that “there are also two typeset errors.” 
 
 After the review conducted by Rae Emerson, the deputy superintendent of Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, the National Park Service recommended that the book not be sold in the Ford’s Theatre basement museum bookstore. 
 
 However, Ford’s Theatre Society, which operates Ford’s Theatre in partnership with the park service, has the book for sale in its gift shop in the ground-floor lobby. Paul R. Tetreault, director of Ford’s Theatre Society, said, “While we understand the National Park Service’s concerns about the book, we decided to let our visitors judge the book themselves.” 
 
 Henry Holt, the publisher of “Killing Lincoln,” said Monday that it has corrected mistakes in the book, which O’Reilly wrote with Martin Dugard. 
 
 “Once we were made aware of the errors in the book, corrections were made in subsequent printings of ‘Killing Lincoln,’ ” Pat Eisemann, Henry Holt’s director of publicity, said in an e-mail. “We continue to fully support the work of the authors.” 
 
 O’Reilly said he has invited Emerson onto his show and noted that the book has more than 1 million copies in print. 
 
 Other readers besides Emerson have said they found historical inaccuracies in the book. Historian Edward Steers Jr., writing in the November issue of “North & South — The Official Magazine of the Civil War Society,” said that O’Reilly and Dugard misidentified the chief carpenter for theater owner John Ford; provided a wrong figure for the number of acres on the farm of Samuel Mudd, the doctor who was convicted of conspiring in the assassination; and incorrectly portrayed the conditions of conspirator Mary Surratt’s imprisonment. 
 
 Emerson said she found, among other inaccuracies, that the authors were wrong about the number of times the play “Our American Cousin” was performed at Ford’s Theatre before Lincoln saw it on the night of his assassination, and that they mistakenly placed Lincoln in the Oval Office, which was not created at the White House until 1909, during the Taft administration. 
 
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 Bill O’Reilly’s ‘Killing Lincoln’ not for sale at Ford’s Theatre museum bookstore ||||| Topics: Bill O'Reilly, History, News, Politics News 
 
 On Friday I wrote about the decision of Ford’s Theatre not to offer Bill O’Reilly’s bestselling new book on the Lincoln assassination at its bookstore because an expert National Park Service reviewer found the work to be riddled with factual errors. 
 
 Now, in a review in a leading Civil War magazine, a second expert has flunked O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln,” calling it “somewhere between an authoritative account and strange fiction.” 
 
 The review (which is not online) appears in the November issue of North & South, the official magazine of the Civil War Society. 
 
 “The narrative contains numerous errors of people, place, and events,” writes reviewer Edward Steers Jr., author of more than five books on the Lincoln assassination. He goes on to list about 10 errors of fact in “Killing Lincoln,” which O’Reilly co-authored with Martin Dugard and which has been atop bestseller lists for weeks. 
 
 A farm where John Wilkes Booth hid after the killing was not 500 acres, as O’Reilly says. It was 217 acres, according to the review. 
 
 O’Reilly refers to John Ford’s chief carpenter as John J. Clifford. In fact, according to the review, his name was Gifford. 
 
 “Lewis Powell, the man assigned to kill secretary of state William Seward, did not speak with ‘an Alabama drawl.’ He was from Florida,” the review notes. 
 
 Steers adds that one entire passage of the book about co-conspirator Mary Surratt is flat-out untrue:
– Bill O'Reilly's book, Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever, has sold nearly a million copies and currently sits at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Only problem is, it's riddled with errors, according to a scathing review from the National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre, Salon reports. Here are a few alleged historical missteps: Killing Lincoln refers several times to the Oval Office. Little problem: The Oval Office wasn't built until 1909. O'Reilly writes of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee: “The two warriors will never meet again.” In fact, they did have a second meeting in 1865 to talk about prisoners of war. According to the book, Ford's Theatre “burned to the ground in 1863.” Sorry Bill, make that 1862. In O'Reilly's words, John Wilkes Booth used "a pen knife to carve a very small peephole" to observe Lincoln in his theater box. But one historical record says the hole was bored so guards could keep an eye on the president. Even an Amazon reviewer is taking aim at apparent inaccuracies in the book. To read more of the Salon article, click here. (Or read about O'Reilly's theological explanation for the Earth's tides.)