I keep a life list of birds since Christmas of ‘95, and a daily journal since June of ‘98. Records are useful for a person who tends to sluff off bits of life and later wonder where he left them. This year we are celebrating the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, and I wish I had kept a list of Lincoln books read from grade school on. Probably most were not so great but I don’t remember feeling that way, and my feeling now is there will always be a need for another great book on Lincoln.
For all of my self-anointed skill at picking books I missed this one. A friend rectified my blunder by giving it as a present. Wise and kind of him. Ronald C. White, Jr., author of A. Lincoln: A Biography, does not need any praise from me but he gets it anyway. This is the best biography you will read this year. It will stay with you as a standard by which to measure other biographies as well as other presidents.
White gives us a full Lincoln from his beginning hard luck scrabble to make more of himself than circumstances dictated to a self-educating lawyer and thinker to a consummate politician and public persuader to a president who struggled to first save the Union and then to birth it as a Union fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence. Along this lifeline nothing is treated as unimportant if it was important to Lincoln at the time. It is not the mythic Lincoln in this book but the ugly A. Lincoln who worked each day to make it his own.
Lincoln was so uncommonly more than others that he casts a shadow on all who lived during his lifetime. He remains a constant reminder that we should not be so lenient in appraising the smallness of our thoughts and responses to others, or so quick to accept limits on what we can do. I can not imagine what would have become of the nation if he had not been there to finally be our Father Abraham. I cannot imagine what we could have become if a self-righteous political zealot had not cut him down. We suffered from this lose in the decades that followed and we suffer today. Charles Marlin
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