A Big Ol' Box o' Lincoln

While this hardly mitigates the dustjacket design, seeing The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, in a boxed set from Library of America, goes a long way to making me happier about trying to sell the book.
I've been trying to get the two volumes of Speeches and Writings back into the store in time for the Bicentennial, but I hadn't had any luck. Now I understand why. Redesigned with red and blue covers, and boxed with the anthology, they make a handsome, if a little on-the-nose design for this bran new presentation.

The two volumes of Lincoln are about the best presentation of Lincoln's words I've ever seen. They are certainly the best and most attractive collections of Lincoln that I own.

At $99.95 the new set is expensive, but had I not already bought separately the three books in it, I would be saving my pennies to get this one some day soon, before it disappears.

Their Lincoln (and Ours)

Eric Foner is exactly the kind of history professor from whom I wish I could take a class; erudite, serious and excited by his subject.  Reading his books, particularly A Short History of Reconstruction and Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, I've become convinced that if there is anyone who can teach me what it meant to be alive in America then, and what the lives of Americans then might and ought to mean to us now, it is Eric Foner.  

His book  The Story of American Freedom is one of those titles I have been pressing into the willing and reluctant hands of customers and coworkers since it's original publication.  I know the title sounds like one of those well intentioned freshman Seminars, taught in an anonymous, drafty lecture hall by some dessicated old party with a slide projector, and actually conducted by weary TAs roaming the aisles with dusty pages of "supplemental readings," but you must trust me when I tell you, it is actually one of the most breathtakingly wide-ranging and scintillating acts of American intellectual history I've ever read.  Reading Foner as he traces the progression of "freedom" and "liberty" through our history, is not unlike spending time, at least as I imagine it, in the personal library of a great bibliophile and conversationalist who darts from his chair every few minutes to produce the exact text he's been quoting from memory, just to show you yet another surprising instance of our mania for, and wildly contradictory usage of, the great watch-words and shibboleths of representative democracy.  It is the author's enthusiasm, as well as his scholarship, that makes him such good company.

Now, for the Lincoln Bicentennial, Eric Foner has edited a new collection of popular essays from noted scholars -- no mean trick in my experience as a reader of history -- on subjects ranging from his own thoughtful consideration of the embarrassing topic of "Lincoln and Colonization," to James M. McPherson's brief summation of "A. Lincoln, Commander in Chief" (which I highly recommend if you don't intend to read McPherson's recent full-length treatment of the subject, reviewed in an earlier posting here.)  Foner's new book is called Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, from W. W. Norton.  In addition to Harold Holzer on Lincoln and art, and Mark E. Neely, Jr. on Lincoln and the Constitution, there are names less familiar to me and essays I was surprised to find myself enjoying thoroughly.  David W. Blight, for example, I did not know.  The very title of his essay, "The Theft of Lincoln in Scholarship, Politics and Public Memory," made me jumpy.  That word "theft" has the spin to it of literary-theory and "historiology" --id est gab about rather than history written.  But it actually proved to be one of my favorites in the collection; taking on the Lincoln pietists, bully patriots, politicians and revisionists all at a go!  Now I must find Blight's latest book, A Slave No More; Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, from 2007, and put my embarrassing suspicions to rest.

I would encourage anyone interested in contemporary Lincoln scholarship to seek out this new collection, without a worry that the common reader will find anything therein but consistently well written, thoughtful, and "theory"-free American history of the best kind. (Foucault, for example, is blessedly absent entirely from the index.  Can I get an "Amen?")

Holzer & Company

In an earlier post, I already expressed my deep displeasure at just how awful the design of the dustjacket is.  But, as I suspected I would, I've now become convinced by the contents that I shall have to have my own copy of Harold Holzer's new Library of America title, The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now.  It is a rich and varied collection -- boy howdy and how.

Where else, exactly, can one find, between two covers, H. L. Mencken's sobering and mirthful essay from his Prejudices: Third Series, in which one finds the "Lincoln legend" so perfectly described as "... a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost," and also Langston Hughes' poem "Lincoln Monument: Washington?"  Holzer has bundled together a wonderfully eclectic collection of people, from contemporaries to biographers, from cartoonists to politicians; from H. G. Wells to Dale Carnegie (!), from Emerson to E. L. Doctorow, and on and on.

Better yet, Harold Holzer has written a brief, often quite pithy preface for each entry.  This from the introduction to Woodrow Wilson's contribution: "Left entirely unmentioned in Wilson's eloquent address were slavery and emancipation -- omissions that were not surprising in light of Wilson's segregation of black government employees and his effusive praise for D. W. Griffith's racist screen epic The Birth of a Nation."

Unlike some earlier anthologies from the Library of America, and here I'm thinking specially of their truly weird collection of Sermons, this volume, in the very capable hands of Harold Holzer, manages to present the familiar and the unknown -- at least to me -- in an entirely satisfying and endlessly surprising way.

As tributes go, this is one of the best, if not the best to date on the occasion of the Bicentennial. 

Further Thoughts on Stacey's Bookstore and the Passing of the Independents

Since my first posting on the sad news that Stacey's Bookstore in San Francisco had announced it will be closing in March after 85 years in San Francisco, I've been following the story online and through friends in San Francisco.  On Facebook I was encouraged to discover a "grassroots" effort organizing to "Save Stacey's Bookstore."  I've also heard from many people, online and off, expressing shock and dismay at the news.  On behalf of Independent Booksellers everywhere, let me extend my thanks to all the good people out there who care about where they buy their books and from whom.  What we do, and the opportunity to do it, depends on just such thoughtful, community-minded patrons.  We have always been, and continue to be grateful for your support, and your business.  And if I may still presume to speak for the booksellers at Stacey's, I'm sure they are just as grateful for the many new and familiar voices joining the chorus now rising to try to save that venerable bookstore.

In my reading online, I have also discovered just how many people there are out there who seem to misunderstand the nature of just what it is we do; assuming, for example, that the prices of the books we sell are a matter of choice for independent retailers, that discounts to customers and variety of selection are dictated exclusively, or even primarily by considerations of profit and promotion, and that even the continued viability of independent bookselling is ultimately more a matter of management and competition than it is a matter of cultural or community significance.  Let me try, in my own unbusinesslike way, to address some of these points, as briefly and as well as I can in this space.

Without becoming too mired in the jargon of bookselling and publishing, let me just begin by suggesting that the whole business of books is, has always been, and Gods willing, will always be an irrational, impractical and frankly foolhardy enterprise.  The suggestion that anyone can, or has, or ought to make a proper, well organized, smooth-running machine of Market Capitalism out of writing, printing, publishing or selling books, is as familiar, and touching to booksellers, however humble, as it is to anyone else who may have spent their lives in the service of books.  Many a better man and woman of business than me has been broken on that wheel.  Business, and in particular the business of books, has seen many an entrepreneur rise and fall in the tide of print.  Many have made fortunes, or at least reputations as innovators and great capitalists from books, from the man who opened bookstalls in Victorian train-stations, to the popularizer of classics in paperback, to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.   Each is to be well remembered and applauded for their contributions to the culture as well as for their business acumen  and willingness to risk their own and other people's money in such, for the time, questionably profitable gambles.  But for every innovator in publishing and selling, there have always been hundreds or possibly even thousands of less daring souls, readers and retailers, bibliophiles and buyers and tradesmen more like... well, me.

We no more set the price of a hardcover from Random House than we determine the value of Amazon.com stock.  And we live, as do the independent publishers, the freelance writers, editors and translators, and, it would seem, the readers and collectors of less established, or well remembered authors, on the narrow margins of solvency, not because we are reckless or stupid or undisciplined, but because what we love is the company of books more perhaps than we do the business of books, and will, it seems, often as not, sacrifice, to our own ultimate ruin perhaps, the latter to secure the former.

A short discounted title from an academic press on an obscure subject?  But surely, Stacey's must have at least a copy of such a book on the shelf when, and if, the right customer comes in to find just such a book?  Else how will the reader know he or she needs it?  Not one, or even a few of the newest or the best books on Lincoln for the University Book Store, but all the titles we can get that might be worth having when we set up a display table to celebrate the Bicentennial of his birthday, else are we not doing a disservice to our customers and to the writers and scholars who have labored to preserve our history and his memory?

And if we can not discount the New York Times Bestsellers list as a result, or choose to promote our own selection instead... And if we can not sell every bestselling new children's title at prices to compete with Costco, but choose to celebrate the PNBA Lifetime Achievement Award winner Alexandra Day by carrying every available title in multiple copies instead... 

That is the value that is lost in the passing of Stacey's.  Those who criticize or sneer at the incompetence of the independent bookstore in the face of the more elegant and profitable business model of the chain store, or whose purchasing is dictated by the automated suggestions provided by the wizardry of online marketing, rather miss the point.  We do not do this, and Stacey's did not do what they did for 85 years, because we, or they, hoped one day to be rich as the result of of our labour.  We, and they, did and do consider ourselves rich in the books and authors we've known, the customers we've met, the generations whose reading and opinions we've cultivated and cared about, in the culture we've supported and sold.  We simple booksellers, in all our enthusiasm and old-fashioned amateurism, have done what we do because we believe, ultimately, more in the supremacy of the word than the dollar.  

And if that sounds too grand for such as us, perhaps it is.  We are ultimately peddlers, not artists.  But do please at least give us this: should Stacey's, and all like it, be allowed to go, do you really think the world will be a more art-full, or a better place?  Or will it be, simply, a more profitable and convenient market?  Nothing wrong with that, of course.  As you like it.

Meanwhile, my thoughts and my heart go to Stacey's and all who still love the books, and the booksellers therein.  

A. Lincoln Comes to Seattle

Thanks to our own Stesha Brandon and the good folks in our Events Department, we will be hosting no less a personage than Ronald C. White, Jr. on January 27th, at 7PM, right here in the store. This is exciting news. A. Lincoln: A Biography, Professor White's new book, was just released today and has already received glowing endorsements from the likes of James M. McPherson, Daniel Walker Howe, Harold Holzer and Jon Meacham, author of the bestselling American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House!

I've only just begun White's book, but I am excited already at the prospect of hearing so eminent a scholar speak on the 16th President. His earlier work includes Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural and The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words.

It should be a very interesting evening and I encourage everyone with an interest in Lincoln to come out to the bookstore to hear this author. I've just started his book and find myself sailing through to page 159, which leaves me only 517 pages yet to go -- and I fear the book will prove to be all too short.

Another's Civil War

Taking the briefest of breaks from my Lincoln reading, before taking on the newest full biography, A. Lincoln, by Ronald C. White Jr. (to be released January 13th,) I turned to Walt Whitman tonight, and his experience of the War, it's devastation's and losses, personal and public.   A new book, Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, by Robert Roper, tells not only of the great poet, but of his family, and in particular two younger brothers who fought in the war.  It is a valuable story, and well told by Roper.

Like most American families, Whitman's was deeply effected by their experience of the War.  Unlike most American families though, the Whitman family had a genius among them.  While the letters, largely unknown to me before, exchanged between the brothers and with their mother and reproduced here, are poignant and very interesting, it is of course to Walt and his poems that one turns to find their experiences, and the experience of our people, memorialized in unforgettable verse.

And Walt Whitman's own experience, nursing and caring for, and genuinely coming to love the soldiers he met in the army hospitals he visited every day, as detailed in an earlier and wonderful book, The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War, by Roy Morris Jr., produced in Whitman, our greatest poet, some of his greatest, and most heartfelt work.

So tonight I find myself reading and rereading Whitman's poems.  And one poem, "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim," haunts me as I see our soldiers again in war; young, older, even my age, and for the most part never seen but in a formal photograph, in uniform, in the paper when they die.  Here is Whitman's poem:

A Sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunk about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step -- and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third -- a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you -- I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here he again lies.  

Lincoln Q & A

Back in 2000, Gerald J. Prokopowicz published All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio 1861 - 1862. Now that is exactly the kind of Civil War title I actively avoid; military history, narrowly focused, the kind of title marketed to Civil War "buffs." Well, I'm no kind of war buff. Having read Shelby Foote's 3 volumes, I really have no interest in reading other titles on the subject. And yet...

I think someone gave me the Prokopowicz. I don't remember how long I had it. Finally, one very long weekend, for want of other history to read, I picked it up and read it straight through. It is not a brief book. It was, however, a fascinating story, crowded with well-intentioned disaster, interesting men, and beautifully told.

Now Professor Prokopowicz has done another very good thing indeed. Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln, from the Vintage Civil War Library, has just been published and, as the title explains, it does a great service by answering all the questions, large and small, that tend to needle readers, teachers and anyone interested in Lincoln. Well illustrated, well organized, and well written, it is, at only $14.95, a considerable resource for so reasonable a price. Drop into it anywhere, and you're likely find something you either didn't know, couldn't remember or never thought to explain with such brevity and sense.

Used Lincoln

Just a reminder: we carry a variety of Used Books, including, for the moment, pretty interesting collection of Lincoln & Civil War titles. These are usually just single copies, so once a title sells we might not see it again for a very long time (we've sold the complete Sandburg about four times, in various conditions, for example -- though naturally we don't have any sets now that the Bicentennial approaches.)

Abraham in Sound-Bites

I love Brian Lamb. How can you not? He's like that high school coach who ends up teaching History because the regular teacher is on maternity leave; he's prepared, got lots of notes, fires off questions like he's drilling plays, and he always seems uncomfortable and enthusiastic in equal parts. If you don't watch "Booknotes," hosted by C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb, you are soooo missing out. It is a great program, particularly for history buffs, among whom Mr. Lamb can clearly be numbered. He's not quite a TV personality, despite years in front of the camera, and that only adds to his charm.

Periodically, C-SPAN gathers some of Lamb's "interviews," or friendly interrogations might be more apt, into a kind of a book. Now, they've gathered excerpts from C-SPAN many wonderful Lincoln broadcasts, Booknotes interviews and the like into a new book, Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President. It isn't really a book, at least not a book of essays, though that's what the clever editors are calling these interview responses and the like. Think of it more as a souvenir of Lincoln chats with some of the best -- and one of the worst -- folks in the field. Every entry is basically a bite-sized summery of remarks on a particular theme, say Lincoln on religion, by a particular historian.

There are a some genuinely bad choices here. The cover, yet again, is an over-designed cypher reproducing the revised Lincoln portrait on the new five dollar bill. All well and good, but faced-out on the shelf, there's nothing to tell you what the Hell this book is! Worse, included without comment is an "essay" from the reactionary fringe economist and "neoconfederate" favorite, Thomas Dilorenzo, on "The Lincoln Cult." This is like including neo-Nazi David Irving in an anthology in tribute to Churchill. Indefensible and offensive.

So, this book is not meant to be so much a serious bit of scholarship as it is a celebration of C-SPAN's ongoing and wonderful participation in the Lincoln Bicentennial. Enjoy it as a companion to the programming, but beware of the psuedo-historian included.

More Lincoln Remainders

And the Lincoln Bargain Books keep coming! Two delightful kids' titles from DK: Abraham Lincoln: A Photographic Story of a Life, by Tanya Lee Stone, $2.98, and Abraham Lincoln & the Civil War: Ultimate Sticker Book, $2.98.

Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Abraham Lincoln's Killer, by James L. Swanson,

in hardcover, for only $7.98!

The Trials of Mrs. Lincoln, by Samuel A. Schreiner, in paperback for only $4.98.

One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln's Road to Civil War, by John C. Waugh, $7.98.

Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America, by Allen C. Guelzo -- two time winner of The Lincoln Prize -- $7.98, in hardcover.

The Lincolns in the White House, by Jerrold M. Packard, in paperback for only $5.98.

Again, just a reminder on remainders: these books are available for only a limited time, so if you want to get copies at these prices, you need to get in quick before they're all gone.

We'll see more Lincoln Bargain Books soon, but don't wait or these won't be here when you come in.

The Difficult Mrs. Lincoln

Poor Mary Lincoln. In her lifetime she became a figure of ridicule, pity and even disdain. Her reputation since has hardly improved. Most often she's been treated, at best, unsympathetically and at worst, she's been portrayed as a harridan, a mad woman and at the very least a considerable pain in the neck.

It wasn't until fairly recently, with the influence of Feminism in historical biography, that the poor woman has really found any friends in academe at all. Her most recent would be Catherine Clinton, who's new biography, Mrs. Lincoln: A life, has just been published. Clinton seems to have the requisite sympathy for her subject -- perhaps even to excess, considering her eagerness to answer every criticism quoted from contemporaries (and there's quite a chorus.) But however kindly meant, Professor Clinton's portrait indulges in the inexcusable habit of fictionalizing; dropping into Mrs. Lincoln's consciousness like a bird into a bath and then flitting off again, without quotation, reference, or any explanation of how the good Professor came to know so exactly the thoughts and feelings of her subject. Worse, Clinton, in her determination to rescue Mrs. Lincoln from her critics, is not above offering contradictory theories to explain the lady's excesses. One unintentionally funny example comes immediately to mind. Describing Mary's entirely understandable prostration at Lincoln's deathbed, Clinton explains how central being there for the moment of death was for the Victorian family, particularly the spouse. Mary Lincoln never got over missing the moment of her husband's passing. Clinton blames everybody in the room but Mary, as if the lady was denied her rights. But it took Lincoln hours to die, and in that time Mary regularly fainted and or became so vocally, wildly distraught as to have to be escorted from the room, thus spoiling the carefully stage managed tableau, and offending the solemnity of the occasion. Well, Clinton, blusters, Mrs. Lincoln was of Irish descent, and Irish ladies, it seems, tend to wail and keen!

It's all too much of muchness.

For a better, if no less sympathetic portrait, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, by Jean H. Baker, is a superior book in every way (one has only to compare the treatment of Lincoln's death in both.) Professor Baker's prose is less overheated, her research better integrated, and her understanding of her subject better grounded in the realities of daily life in Lincoln's White House and the period in general. No book I've read has ever come closer to making me, if not fond of Mrs. Lincoln, at least less likely to dread her recurrence on the scene. Recently republished with a new preface by the author, this would be the one to read.

Lincoln Remainders

Our Discount Books buyers have been scouting for Lincoln books, and the first few are in. Remainders, for any who might not know the bookseller lingo, are titles the publishers are discontinuing so the remaining stock is sold off at a higher discount, meaning lower prices for readers.

The prices are great, but the quantities are limited, so if you want any of these, you'd best hurry in before they are gone. (Once they're gone, they're gone for good.)

Just a few titles:

Holland's Life of Abraham Lincoln is one of the first major Lincoln biographies, published not long after Lincoln's death, by the founder of Scribner's Magazine. $7.98 in paperback.

Lincoln in The Times: The Life of Abraham Lincoln as Originally Reported in The New York Times, edited by David Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer -- two names that should be familiar to Lincoln readers (and to readers of this blog.) $8.98 in hardcover.

Father Abraham: Lincoln's Relentless Struggle to End Slavery, by Richard Striner. $9.98 in hardcover.

Black Men Built the Capital: Discovering African-American History in and Around Washington, D.C., by Jesse Holland -- referenced in a number of recent articles about the incoming administration and the changing face of the Nation's capital. Only $5.98 in paperback.

Many more to come, so keep an eye on this blog and the Bargain Books tables in the main lobby!

The Most Important Debate

The Lincoln/Douglas debates are justifiably famous, much written about still, and a source of endless interest to scholars and readers alike.  But the Douglas who now towers over our memory of the Civil War, is not "the Little Giant" who fought Lincoln for the Illinois Senate seat.  There is perhaps no more important American thinker and writer of the period, from the modern perspective, save possibly Lincoln himself, then Frederick Douglas.  A former slave, author of a remarkable autobiography that to my knowledge has never since been out of print, an abolitionist, newspaperman, a philosopher, and a champion of his people, and of civilization, Frederick Douglas is among the most inexhaustible subjects for study in our history.

His name is inevitably linked to that of Lincoln.  Now there are two books -- one new and the other from just a year ago -- that make that connection explicit.  John Stauffer's Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln is the latest, and has, rightly, received a great deal of press.  It is an excellent book; well researched and well told by this young Harvard professor.  Stauffer's equitable division of attention, even as the l

ives of his subjects both grow increasingly complex and eventually intersect, is handled masterfully throughout, never stinting either man. 

The slightly older title, Douglas and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union, by Paul and Stephen Kendrick, who are father and son, is more concerned with Douglas and specifically his campaign to free his people, with or without the assistance of the President of the United States.  The perspective is that of Frederick Douglas here and, without the constraints of writing a dual biography, the Kendricks can and do concentrate on Douglas and his amazing achievements, not least of which was hectoring, denouncing, eventually meeting with, and even coming to respect Abraham Lincoln.   The scene of their first actual meeting is electrifying in both tellings, and is, for me, one of the most dramatic moments in our history, though the meeting itself was nothing if not civil on both sides.  Still, at that moment, the United States, was changed.

Having two such richly detailed books about two such remarkable figures is a bonanza for students of American history.  That both are accessible, well researched and well written is a delight and a surprise for readers in this Lincoln Bicentennial Year.

Tried By Fire

James M. McPherson is of the school of my favorite historians, the great popularizers; writers of sound and exciting prose narratives whose subject is history, whose audience is non-academics, and whose mission is to keep alive our history for the common reader.  Using the most comprehensive research, but not encumbered by endless footnotes detailing and rehashing the debates of point inevitable when historians disagree, McPherson's books are models of the kind of history that so seldom gets written nowadays, but always gets read. 

His new book, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, takes a more narrow focus than most of the new Lincoln biographies, and concentrates on how Lincoln ran the war; fighting his generals, shaping public opinion in the North, using, and possibly even abusing his powers as Commander in Chief, all with the single goal of preserving the Union.  Presumably taking Lincoln's dogged concentration as his example, McPherson refuses the thousand distractions -- philosophical, anecdotal, biographical -- to which any writing about Lincoln and the Civil War are prone, and keeps to a linear telling of one man's efforts to do an almost impossible thing and how he triumphantly did it; at the cost of thousands of lives, millions of dollars, and ultimately at the cost of his own life.  It is the most remarkable individual story in our history, and this is an aspect of that story too little understood and never told in quite this way before.

McPherson's book is one of the best of the new Lincolns, and I can not imagine a better writer to tell it.   I am not a reader of military history.  I have too little sympathy with the men who make war and not the right kind of brain to follow troop movements and tactics and the like.  But by placing Lincoln at the center of his book, and by telling the story of the war as it passed through Lincoln's hands, McPherson has managed the very difficult task of making this a thrilling, frustrating and even a very moving story of an individual man, a great man, without diminishing in any way the enormity of what happened or the sacrifices and tragedies of the millions who fought and suffered at his behest.  Lincoln emerges from McPherson's pages as a commander, not trained or experienced to conduct war, but determined to do whatever had to be done and doing it.  It is a fascinating portrait. 

A (Forthcoming) Story for Younger Readers

In, I think, the second grade, already the consummate ham, I organized a "play" to commemorate Lincoln's Birthday at a PTA meeting. Aided by my pals Jeff (as Lincoln) and Joel (as Booth,) we re-enacted the tragedy of Lincoln's assassination. When Booth jumped from the scene of the crime to the stage, he nearly took the bunting and the Presidential Box -- made of cardboard -- with him. Luckily the dying Lincoln thoughtfully grabbed our falling set and held it throughout the rest of the action. Now why we chose the assassination as our tribute on the man's birthday, I do not now recall. I do remember that I was the narrator and Jeff was cast as Lincoln because, unlike me, he must have already been well over three feet tall.

I am not a big fan of assassination histories. Most tend to be written by conspiracy theorists and like minded paranoids. So when a great book does come along dealing with Lincoln's untimely end, it takes me awhile to warm to it.

Well, there is such a book on Lincoln's assassins, and I'm recommending here, a bit late. James L. Swanson has written the definitive history of the flight of John Wilkes Booth, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. Published in 2006, it is in paperback now. Terribly exciting, and full of information previously unknown to me, Swanson's book managed to tell a familiar story in a remarkably fresh way; taking the flight of Booth as an opportunity to detail both the hunt, and the immediate consequences of the assassination.

Come February, Swanson has a new book coming out, for younger readers: Chasing Lincoln's Killer. The author has recast the whole story in language appropriate for this new audience without losing the excitement and serious scholarship of the adult version. The new book is handsomely designed, includes a number of large illustrations, and will sell in hardcover for only $16.95. A perfect gift for a younger history buff. Much better, no doubt, if less hilarious, than my production from the 2nd grade.

All Too Brief a Life -- Two brief Lives of Lincoln

I'm a big fan of brief lives. From Plutarch's Lives to Johnson's Lives of the Poets, to the wonderful Penguin Lives. I've been collecting the Penguins since they started the series. It is exactly the kind of project that hooks me every time; famous contemporary authors picking their own subjects and then writing a short biography. Because of the quality of the authors and the writing, I've read Penguin Lives of everyone from Elvis Presley, by Bobbie Ann Mason, to Pope John XXIII, by Thomas Cahill. Thomas Keneally, the Australian novelist, author of Schindler's Ark, wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln for the series. And a good book it is too.

Now James M. McPherson, the preeminent American historian of the Civil War, has written a brief life of Lincoln for the Oxford University Press. McPherson's Abraham Lincoln: A Presidential Life is everything a brief life should be; concise, accurate, carefully written, and at only 65 pages plus notes, a genuinely brief life. Priced at only $12.95 in hardcover, it is the easiest Lincoln to hand to anyone expressing an interest in the 16th President, no matter how limited the time the time of the reader.

The New Standard of David Herbert Donald

What makes a biography the “standard life?” Most obviously, if the biography eventually eclipses the subject in fame – think of Boswell’s Johnson – then all subsequent biographies, no matter the additional information they contain, or the quality of the writing – and again Samuel Johnson comes first to mind – will always be something less than the standard. Generally though, if the fame of the subject is sustained across generations, then each generation will produce a new standard life to replace those that preceded it. And here no better example exists than the biographers of Abraham Lincoln.

From Nicolay & Hay in 1890, to Ida Tarbell in 1900, to Beveredge, to Sandburg, to James G. Randall, our 16th President has never lacked a standard life in print for each passing generation.

So what makes David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln the standard life for our times? First, Donald had access to the Lincoln Papers, which previous biographers did not. As a result of the materials available to him, but perhaps more importantly, because of the man who emerged from those sources, Donald’s portrait is of a very different, and much more accessibly modern man than the one we know from the earlier portraits.

I’ll let Donald (from his preface,) speak for himself:

“In focusing closely on Lincoln himself – on what he knew, when he knew it, and why he made his decisions – I have, I think, produced a portrait rather different from that of other biographers. It is perhaps a bit more grainy than most, with more attention to his unquenchable ambition, to his brain-numbing labor in his law practice, to his tempestuous married life, and to his defeats. It suggests how often chance, or accident, played a determining role in shaping his life. And it emphasizes his enormous capacity for growth, which enabled one of the least experienced and most poorly prepared men ever elected to high office to become the greatest American President.”

David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln is still our Lincoln, but in the hands of this extraordinary historian and biographer, Abraham Lincoln is once again his own man as well; flawed, sad, brilliant and profoundly human.

Trials of a President Elect

Harold Holzer is a remarkable scholar with more than forty books to his credit, the majority to do with Lincoln. Of his earlier books, I particularly enjoyed Lincoln at Cooper Union, which won him the Lincoln Prize, though that's just one of the many awards his work has won.  

Holzer's new book, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860 - 1861, is a meticulous survey of one of the most difficult and controversial periods in Lincoln's life. At the time of his election, the 16th President of the United States was faced with a divided nation. He had received a substantial majority in the North, but in the South, and the West, Lincoln had no such mandate, in many Southern states his name had not even appeared on the ballot! Many secessionists were waiting for Lincoln's election to provide the final straw that would break the Union apart. As a result, even Lincoln's personal safety was to become an issue before he'd ever taken the Oath. Additionally, there was the curious custom, not to be abolished until FDR, that delayed the transition for months after the election was decided. All of these factors contributed to perhaps the worst presidential transition in the nation's history.

And then there was Abraham Lincoln himself. Holzer examines the historical consensus on this period, and Lincoln's performance as President Elect, and takes issue with much that has been written and assumed to date. In a genuinely fascinating account of what Lincoln and his contemporaries actually said and did during ridiculously difficult and mutable circumstances, the historian reconstructs both the period and the man in light of recent scholarship and the historical record. Holzer's conclusions can be startling as well as reassuring, and more importantly, they are never arbitrary. His portrait therefore is a careful one, of a very careful man in an all but impossible position. Holzer's Lincoln is still untried, not yet "Father Abraham," and that makes this one of the most interesting biographical studies to have seen print in this new season of Lincoln abundance.

Looking at Looking for Lincoln

In the ongoing Frenzy of Lincoln Bicentennial publishing, by far the biggest and most visually satisfying offering this year to date would have to be Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon.  Requiring the services of what seems to be nearly the whole Kunhardt family, who, according to their fascinating preface, have been in the business of Lincoln collecting and writing for generations, this volume brings together a truly cornucopian selection of photos, contemporary quotations, and memorabilia.  

Unlike their earlier (and sadly out of print,) Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography, this weighty volume from the Kunhardts is concerned less with his life than with witness and what one might call the afterlife of Lincoln.  As a result, there is much new here for even the devoted reader of Lincoln biography and post-Civil War history; Lincoln's children, the later lives of his friends and coworkers, his place in our history and hearts.

Boasting an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the author of the (again) bestselling A Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and a forward by David Herbert Donald, the author of the best contemporary, one volume biography, titled simply Lincoln, this new book is a treasure trove of excellent scholarship, sound writing, and fascinating side-lights to the Lincoln story. 

At $50.00, this is not an inexpensive book, but it is a beautiful addition to any Lincoln library.

William Lee Miller's Lincoln

William Lee Miller is my favorite living American historian. If you don't know him, you should. His book from 1998, Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress won the D. B. Hardeman Prize for the best book about Congress and is a book I've read and reread. I've read a good deal about John Quincy Adams, including the latest biography by Joseph Wheelan, Mr. Adams Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress, which is a fine book, but I've never read a better book on Adams than William Lee Miller's. (It's available for order now as a "Lightning Print" book -- this means a book that can be ordered, prepaid and nonreturnable from the distributor. This is a newish thing in publishing that keeps titles available that would otherwise go out of print.)

Miller has written -- to date -- two books on Lincoln. Neither is a straight-forward biography, they are instead profound considerations of Lincoln as a statesman and moral force in our history.

The first, Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, traces Lincoln's development as a politician and political thinker, using a close reading of what Lincoln actually said and wrote to create one of the most thoughtful portraits I've ever read, not of a Great Man, but of a man who became great.


The second, only now out in paperback, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, shows how Lincoln, as President, transformed both himself and the office to become our greatest President since Washington.

William Lee Miller is a national treasure; politically engaged, a teacher of great reputation, a writer of great verve and wit, an ethicist and an historian of truly remarkable gifts. I can think of no one better qualified to explore the true nature of Abraham Lincoln and his unique place in our history.