A Word About Reading and Abraham Lincoln

A blog allows flexibility in writing about subjects that I don’t get to include in my weekly column in The Courant. One of those topics is books. I like to read and bang on about them, so here’s my first post about a book.

Last week marked the end of the bicentennial year of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.

The scope of his improbable life and the world he created is not easy to tell in a single volume, but David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln (1995) does. Donald sets out his stall in the preface, declaring, “It is, then, a biography written from Lincoln’s point of view, using the information and ideas that were available to him.”

It must have required a lot of discipline not to stray from that shrewd approach. The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend feature Five Best suggests a few other looks at Lincoln.