David Herbert Donald

Draws extensively on Lincoln's personal papers and legal writings to present a biography of the president

Lincoln

Jeremy Anderberg

“With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure.” —Lincoln

Born on the frontier in a one-room cabin. Autodidact with little in the way of schooling. Lawyer from Illinois. President. Emancipation. War stuff. Ford’s Theater. I thought I knew plenty about Abraham Lincoln.

This book corrected me.

In general, I think it’s safe to say that people know more about the outlines of Lincoln’s life than just about any other president. But when you read a full-scale biography of him, you realize Lincoln was even more brilliant and shrewd and inspiring and political and ambitious and empathetic than the cookie cutter version you get in pop culture.

As I said above, there’s something intensely compelling about Lincoln the man — he was so human compared to other famous figures. But Lincoln the politician was also fascinating to read about. While he had practically no experience in government before being elected POTUS (besides two years in Congress in the late 1840s), he taught himself how to be a great political leader. As we know from our nation’s history, anything that can be made political, will be. The Civil War was no different, and indeed even the Emancipation Proclamation was largely a political document (and a brilliant one at that).

It’s hard to imagine what other presidents would have done during the Civil War. Andrew Jackson surely would have had Lincoln’s fortitude, but none of his compassion. Madison would have theorized very well, but likely not done great with the practical matters of being Commander-in-Chief during a war. Lincoln had the perfect constellation of traits to lead the United States of America through its defining crisis.

Donald’s book has long been considered among the best and most readable one-volume biographies of Lincoln around. While the prose is good, Donald isn’t a great narrative writer of history, and seems to give Lincoln less emotion than other historians. (Though, in all honesty, it helped to picture Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln while reading this.)

That said, I’ll repeat what I’ve already conveyed a couple times: Abraham Lincoln is so interesting to me as a subject of study that I flew through this book. For people who are interested in POTUS #16, this is a great starting point. And though I can’t judge it within the canon of Lincoln books (I’ve not read enough of the 15,000 published about the man), I can say that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more accessible biography that still goes into great detail about his entire life from cradle to grave.

Jeni Enjaian

You know you have read too many Lincoln biographies when even the most trivial of facts included in a comprehensive biography is not new information. That was a personal hurdle I had to overcome before being able to objectively review this book.
Donald composed a tight yet expansive narrative that clearly aligns with his outlined thesis and supporting points in the introduction. Donald states that he intends to stick closely to the events that Lincoln himself would have been personally aware of and involved in. I appreciated this approach after reading far too many Lincoln biographies that stray widely into military battle history. Information about the battles found its way into Donald's narrative but in a fashion that fit with Donald's stated objective.
I highly recommend this biography as the one to read about Lincoln. Donald's historiography stands heads and shoulders - like his subject - above the rest.

Lincoln

Reviews