LINCOLN

Rating:
Summary: Not bad...
Review: I have been reading Lincoln and listening to With Malice Toward None as a book on tape. I have been keeping syncronized chronilogically in the two works. It surprizes me how little the two works overlap in small details. President Lincoln must have left a very large amount of detail to provide such varied life snippets.

Lincoln seems to show President Lincoln's human side, and seems to take a slightly negative outlook on President Lincoln's life. The preface mentions that the author disdains the folklore that has grown up around President Lincoln. I can understand this viewpoint (the author must have been seeking the historical "truth"), however, it seems th author has tried to get as far way from the President Lincoln of the folklore as he can. In going through both works at the same time, I can see that there are multiple ways to interpret the same events. The author of Lincoln has taken a "realistic" point of view, where the author of With Malice Toward None has taken a slightly more positive point of view. I enjoy both works, but prefer the more positive perspective on this great president's life.

Rating:
Summary: What a wonderful book!
Review: This book made me appreciate just how great a leader Lincoln was. It describes how Lincoln masterfully managed situations ranging from his own awkwardness to the struggles within his administration and the crises of the War. Lincoln ruled during complicated times with simple common-sense principles, rarely applied today. When asked to recommend just one book to then-President-elect George W. Bush, then-President Clinton (a voracious reader) suggested David Herbert Donald's Lincoln. Chief Justice Rehnquist also referred to this book during an interview as a valuable source of information for his own writtings. I strongly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Another Look at Lincoln
Review: The contemporary account and interpretation of the life of Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Donald's effort is exhaustive and meticulously researched, and tends to rely on that research instead of Lincoln's own words to create a profile of him. Mr. Donald's Lincoln is a master politician, and his skill in holding together factions within the Union, the rebellion, the Republican Party, the radicals, military, cabinet, and family validate his place in history as "having saved the Union." Mr. Lincoln's words are given a context to what was happening around him, and showed how his words did not sometimes match up with his actions or comments to others. I suspect that this is Mr. Donald's interpretation of Lincoln, and it certainly flies in the face of what we have learned about Lincoln in the past.

Mr. Donald never misses an opportunity to describe Lincoln as "ugly" or "homely" and uses comments from others on several occasions to do this. It seems that Mr. Donald uses the book to cast the former President in a not-so-flattering light at times, and to offer an interpretation of him that some Americans will not be comfortable with. Perhaps this was his plan, and casts Lincoln more as a human being than the monolith he sometimes is described as. It certainly gives us another look at Lincoln, and made an important contribution to my understanding of him. I am keeping Mr. Donald's volume in perspective with all else I have studied about Lincoln, and using it to further piece together my image of him.

Mr. Donald's place as an eminent historian and his overall reverence for Lincoln is apparant. This is an important work that should not be missed, but keep the volume in perspective as an interpretation of one author and seek other volumes to cast a more complete picture. Any student of history should do this and I doubt that Mr. Donald would disagree.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful biography of our great President
Review: I admit I have read and reread this book several times, and am rewarded each time. David Herbert Donald resists the temptation to stuff in too many facts and incidents, and hits the highlights well, including Lincoln's easy-to-criticize supervision and choosing of his generals and cabinet. What's so striking is to watch this rather ordinary man confronted with the most intense pressure -- and save the Union. His evolving seriousness about eliminating slavery is shown well also. Donald makes a good and crucial point-of-view decision: he focuses on what Lincoln knew and when he knew it, so he does not delve into things Lincoln did not know. This helps illuminate Lincoln's decision making process (something I always find especially interesting in presidential biographies). Donald shows us Lincoln in his ordinary (and therefore so impressive and noble) humanity -- like Hamlet said of his father, he "was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look on his like again."

Rating:
Summary: Great writing However question the conclusion
Review: This book is a great biography of a great life in American History. The writing is excellent. My problem with the book is the emphasis on the April 4, 1864 correspondence where Lincoln states he was controlled by events. Where Lincoln like all politicians adapted to the changed political landscape due to the cataclysmic events of the Civil War, his adaptations ennobled, emboldened and redeemed the United States and its citizens. I belive Donald wished to stress Lincoln as a practical politician over his greatness and this emphasis was to the detriment of his outstanding work. Thus other politicians such as ex-President Clinton who admire this book, but their political agility was and is self-serving and led to a coarsening of the political discussion, participation and life in the United States.

Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating Portrait of America's Most-Admired President
Review: Donald's book is the remarkable product of an enormous amount of research, replete with quotes and insight not only from Lincoln's personal writings, but also from countless individuals who surrounded Lincoln at any given time in his life, resulting in a balanced portait of our most beloved President. What is perhaps most surprising is the book's readability - Donald masterfully avoids getting bogged down in insignificant detail, and succeeds in keeping the book moving along the major events of Lincoln's life.

The reader (at least, this reader) is left with a sense of awe at Lincoln's humble integrity, tested in the most trying of circumstances and confronted with the most impossible of choices. The accuracy of his foresight has been amply confirmed by our hindsight, and we as a nation are left with deepest gratitude for his service.

I disagree with criticism that Donald's book lacks sufficient information about Lincoln's personal life and emotions. The biography is designed to be primarily a story of Lincoln the statesman, not Lincoln the husband or father. Those elements are introduced at relevant times, but Donald (appropriately, in my view) does not dwell extensively on those relationships. There are other books which explore those aspects of Lincoln's life in greater detail. I appreciate that Donald avoids engaging in supposition at what Lincoln "must have" been feeling at any particular time - he sticks to what is evidenced in Lincoln's writings and what others observed in him. This inspires in the reader greater confidence in the accurary of Donald's analysis.

Finally, my one criticism: at times I would have appreciated getting the full text of some of Lincoln's short, remarkable speeches, such as the Gettysburg Address or Lincoln's second inaugural address. Donald wrote about them and quoted certain phrases, but we do not get the text in full, which I thought would have been appropriate and feasible. Also (okay, maybe two criticisms), I would have liked to see a few pages or a short chapter about the immediate aftermath of Lincoln's death - the reaction of the nation, the funeral, his legacy. Donald ends the book the moment Lincoln expires.

That said, I would recommend the book to anyone interested in learning about the man who lead our nation through its greatest crisis. I am not normally a big fan of histories or biography, but this one is indispensable.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book on the Greatest President!!
Review: This was a fantastic book of America's greatest president. Donald's account of Lincoln paints a full picture of the man few knew little about, from the pain and suffering of Lincoln's youth to his struggles to become a great leader. The personal side of Lincoln is brought to light in great detail. This is an excellent book and I recommend it to all to learn more about greatest president.

Rating:
Summary: Superb account of 16th President
Review: Recently, I picked up David Herbert Donald's biography of Abraham Lincoln for the second time in 4 years. I now realize that I was too young then to appreciate this superb account of the our 16th President. Inspired by a meeting with President Kennedy in whick JFK criticizes historians for judging presidents who must make decisions without the 20/20 hindsight of historians, Donald undertook to write this biography from Lincoln's perspective -- analyzing him and his decisions based upon only what Lincoln knew, believed, and sought to accomplish at the time. We see the great struggles of the mid-1800s completely through his eyes; thus, while Donald doesn't delve into what (I'm sure) are fascinating related subjects, like the details of the great military campaigns or internal Confederate politics, we do gain an insightful look into the life and character of America's greatest president.

I agree with other reviewers that while there is not enough of Lincoln's personal life -- at times I had to remind myself that the man even had kids! -- Donald still skillfully paints a portrait of an amazingly complex man. Fueled by a desire to escape the fate of his uneducated, unambitious father, Lincoln felt driven all of his life to succeed ; he felt pushed forward to a great destiny by God, or the "Doctrine of Neccsity",that was completely out of his control and would lead him safely down life's path. He was an incredibly charming man who could light up a room with his energy, but he also regularly plunged into a deep and dark depression. He was utterly self-confident and knew he was the equal of any man. Intitially a moderate who opposed abolishing slavery in the states, he slowly realized that either slavery would be destroyed, or the Union surely would be.

He was also a master politician. He sensed early on in the 1840s that the nation was on the brink of a new era and that the Whig party had to adapt to the changing times, or die. After his beloved Whig party disintegrated, he helped establish the IL Republican party and, after an unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1858, triumphed over well-known and powerful opponents like William Seward and Salmon Chase to win the presidential nomination and election in 1860. Throughout his political career and his tenure as President he stuck to the center and walked a tightrope between the Conservatives and Radicals in his own party and the Peace Democrats in the other party. While unailingly honest, he understood the political value of ambiguity to cloud facts that he would admit only if forced. Finally, at the dawn of his second term, he had so outmaneuvered all of his opponents in the Congress, in the North, and in the South, that he stood as the unquestioned master of American politics -- not bad for a boy who had grown up in a log cabin with less than a year of formal schooling.

Doanld shows us Lincoln, the man and not merely the statue. Like the rest of us, he was a fallible human being who wasn't always sure that what he was doing was right but sure that he owed it to his country to serve it with honor and dignity in its hour of greatest peril. Donald makes it clear that we owe our country to this man, and one can't put down this book without agreeing.

Rating:
Summary: Complex Story of an American Icon
Review: Donald's Lincoln is a rare compilation of the many faces of a complex icon of American history. We are used to looking at Lincoln, as well as Washington, as these larger than life figures who were loved and adored by their contemporaries and who unshakably led the nation out of crisis. While in the end Lincoln may have been larger than life, Donald presents him as undeniably human with all the attendant passions, loves, emotions and idiosyncracies.

It is probably because Donald's Lincoln comes across so human that one really feels in awe when his accomplishments are considered. The Lincoln that saved the Union was also the Lincoln that broke down with the deaths of his sons, who too easily suspended the civil rights of Northerners, and who was hated by major parts of his own Republican Party. Donald shows each side of Lincoln, as the loving father and ruthless politician. The book is so compelling that even though one knows that he was assassinated, that one hopes that the end of the book will be different.

The only limitation is one that Donald readily admits to. That being that the book is focused on Lincoln and his experiences. The major battles and events of the Civil War are dealt with in a cursory fashion and only as to how Lincoln viewed then or was effected. As it realties to the War, the book is a political rather then a military history. While I have extensively read about the War, it is my assumption that if one does not have a solid background, a lot of the nuance will be lost.

All in all this is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: A unique president during a unique time in our history.
Review: Mr. Lincoln was indeed a unique President during a unique time in American history due primarily to the Civil War. No president before or since has had to deal with the internal strife and revolution that our country experienced during that time.

This was a fascinating story to read and well worth my time. The book includes an overview of the Civil War and several of its decisive battles and turning points. It details Mr. Lincoln's struggles with the Armies of the North and South, his involvement in the war and his dealings with General Grant and numerous others generals, statesmen and political figures from both sides during the war.

The book details his early childhood and upbringing, his career as a lawyer and struggles to raise and support a family and how his dedication to truth and honesty got him pulled into the political limelight and eventually the presidency.

A sense of his character and honesty is illustrated when as a struggling lawyer he returned a large fee from a client stating that the work he had done was not worth that much money. Imagine a lawyer today turning down fees, imagine our senators and representatives with that kind of truthfulness and honesty! William Jefferson Clinton should be ashamed of himself compared to Abraham Lincoln.

Anyone interested in the Civil War period or presidential history should read this book.