Rating: 
Summary: Tough Sledding
Review: Wilson opens "Honor's Voice" with an overly long introduction to his methodology, which, in brief, is to sort through all the bits and tales and legends about Abraham Lincoln from age 22 to 33, and weighing the stories for credibility and accuracy, reach the truest picture of the young man. Because there is no shortage of material, Wilson has focused on ten themes, including how he educated himself, how he entered politics, his relations with women, and particularly with Mary Todd, etc.The problem is that it's not clear for whom Wilson is writing. Wilson himself declares that the book is not for academics, but who else would be interested in a work that is less about Lincoln than about stories about Lincoln? Few of the legion Lincoln fans, save scholars, would have the interest or the patience for a tedious historiography and word-by-word analysis of obscure letters and notes about the life of their subject. For example, the first chapter examines a wrestling match Lincoln had at age 22, and fully describes the match and its significance in three interesting pages. The problem is the chapter goes of for 33 pages, citing dozens of sources, including eyewitnesses as well as later biographers, analyzes differences in their accounts of the match, and weighs them against each other for credibility. This approach may be a useful "how to" for amateur historians, but most readers would likely prefer more history and less methodology. Fortunately, the first chapter is the toughest sledding. The subsequent ones follow the same pattern, but are far more readable, relying less on Wilson's interior dialogues on reliability and veracity. Lincoln's character slowly and arduously emerges, and Lincoln fans with the patience to wade through will find loads of interesting detail, such as on his surveying and early political careers. Wilson also excerpts snatches of Lincoln's favorite poems (Burns, Byron, etc.) to excellent effect in demonstrating both source and reflection of Lincoln's state of mind. The speculation on his melancholy and on his tragic romance with Ann Rutledge are well worthwhile, if a bit tedious. The book is a good one, but could be much better. Perhaps Wilson will follow up with a book of half the length giving a detailed and straightforward history of this fascinating period in Lincoln's life based on the conclusions from this work, but omitting the tedium and repetition
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