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?")

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.

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. 

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.