Recommended Books about Lincoln

At last count, Amazon.com listed more than 66,000 books about Abraham Lincoln, with more being added every day. Which of these should you read? Many historians recommend starting with James McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln, a fluid distillation of a scholar’s lifetime of writing about the 16^th President. For contrasting perspectives, try pairing very different books about Lincoln.

• William Bartelt, There I Grew Up: Remembering Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana Youth and Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. Bartelt’s book is as local as it is possible to be, collecting the collections of memories of everyone who knew Lincoln while he grew up in Indiana. Gopnik’s graceful little book (recognizing that Charles Darwin also was born on February 12, 1809) comes at Lincoln from the opposite side of the universe.

             

 

• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln focuses on Lincoln the politician; Garry Wills, , looks at Lincoln, the masterful intellectual and rhetorician. Without the two sides, we would not have Lincoln.

 

• It is important to see the changing ways Lincoln has been viewed, the ways in which his life has been used. Harold Holzer’s The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy, from 1860 to Now, collects reflections about Lincoln from writers, politicians, and intellectuals from around the world. Barry Schwartz, in Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth Century America, focuses on recent popular and scholarly appropriations of Lincoln.

 

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