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Title: Lincoln
ISBN: 068482535X
Author:
David Herbert Donald
Publicate Date: 1996-11-05
Publish: 1996-11-05
List Price: $20.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $9.95
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $5.95
Amazon Merchant Price: $13.60
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| Customer Review: |
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1: The best narrative of Lincoln's life
Everyone has their favorite one-volume biography of Lincoln. This is not just mine, but many others' as well. Reason: its narrow focus--the man himself, what he saw, knew, did, and thought, from birth to death. No grand historical sweep here, no psycholgical deconstruction, no "lessons", for historians, or future presidents, or anyone else. Just clean, utterly credible narrative.
Professor Donald was 76 years old when he published this work. He immersed himself in the Abraham Lincoln Papers, which had been sealed for eighty years, until 1947. He had written or co-written ten previous books about Lincoln and the Civil War era. That deep learning gave him the confidence to write this book with particluar clarity and force.
When Michaelangelo was asked how he carved his "David", he is said to have answered, "It was already there, in the marble. I just carved away all that was not David." Here, Donald has carved away all that is not Lincoln, and the result is sublime.
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2: Lincoln
We all know how the story of Lincoln tragically ends. Therefore it is a testament to the biographer's consummate writing talent that one still feels a sense of emotion and loss when he describes that night at the Ford Theater. In the six hundred pages that come before, he so perfectly captures Abraham Lincoln the man, his strengths, his sometimes surprising flaws, that you feel in some way you know him. That is David Herbert Donald's singular achievement. With a style that avoids stuffiness and prolixity, this is a great read for both the casual reader and the more serious student of history.
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3: Definitive, but . . .
I read this book a couple of years ago. I've heard it described more than once as the "definitive" Lincoln bio, but it's not the most readable. I don't insist that the history I read be easy and light, but this book was a bit too dense and detailed for me. Parts were interesting, but I got majorly bogged down in the middle. There have to be Lincoln bios out there that would be of more interest to the general reader.
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4: Tight focus on Lincoln, not on larger events
This is a biography of Lincoln. The problem in writing a biography of Lincoln, of course, is that so many thousands of books on Lincoln have already been written. How do you say anything new and useful about the man, about whom more words have been written than anyone else in American history?
Donald deals with this problem by adopting an unusual biographic strategy. In most biographies, of course, the writer is writing both the life of the subject and at least to some degree larger history. To put the life into context, as a rule, the writer needs to explore the larger issues with which the person was concerned.
Donald very deliberately does not do this. He says in his introduction that is not a general history of 19th century America and it is not. He says that he will focus only on Lincoln himself, and he does. He does not, for example, give us a detailed description of any of the Civil War battles. Lincoln was not present at those battles, so they are not described. His focus is exclusively on Lincoln, the people around him and the events in which he was directly invovled.
The result is odd, but it works. You get very little about the overall strategy of the Civil War. You get next to nothing about Congressional politics in the Civil War. You get virtually nothing about the Confederacy. Instead, you get this kind of reality-TV approach, where you feel as if you were following Lincoln around.
In line with this approach, Donald offers a minimum of interpretation. He presents no arguments about Lincoln's signifigance or role in history. The thesis of the book, if you can call it that, is a very understated argument that LIncoln saw himself as the passive instrument of events, rather than the active shaper of them. It is more a theme, a literary device, than an argument.
The book, in short, takes a minimalist approach to the subject. It works, simply because there is so much written on LIncoln. Out of the vast oceans of material that one could cover, and out of the oceans of argument one could make, Donald sticks tight to the subject and lets events speak for themselves. The end result is that he is able to write a very full biography, on his own odd terms, and keep it just under 600 pages of text. I found the book kind of cold emotionally, but nonetheless very gripping and very informative. I would not call it a definitive biography of Lincoln -- it is too short and self-consciously limited for that -- but, as one volume biographies go, it is very, very good.
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5: My favorite Lincoln Biography. Excellent.
I have a read a lot of biographical works on Abraham Lincoln. I found this to be the best and most balanced view. If you read biographies or other works related to Abraham Lincoln, you must include this book. It is required reading and was written by one of the - if not the - preeminent scholar on Lincoln.
I would also recommend you to other books, in addition to this one, if you desire to learn about Abraham Lincoln. Reading a variety of biographies about Abraham Lincoln will give you an overall and better picture than one book can alone.
However, having said that, this is the best Lincoln biography. It is excellent.
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