Reviews of New Lincoln Books
Lincoln Monuments

Reviews by WILLIAM SAFIRE writing in The New York Times Review of Books,

February 6, 2009

Begin by resisting a wave of adulation in the deluge of books occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, a bicentennial celebration that follows by only a few weeks the inauguration of America’s first black president. We can appreciate the symbolism of Barack Obama’s decision to be sworn in on the Great Emancipator’s Bible, but we need not canonize Lincoln as our “secular saint,” not just murdered but “martyred.”

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

His is a life more worthy of detailed study than dutiful reverence. Fortunately, in the dozens of biographies and histories published in the 200th year since his birth, we have excellent new ways to tunnel through the mountain of myth that, even generations ago, had been built around his contradictory personality. His gentle humor and love of anecdotes were overcast with bouts of what was then called “the hypo” or melancholia.

Though a member of no church, Lincoln meditated profoundly on the inscrutable justice of God. Though a family man and a forgiving soul, he refused to attend his own father’s funeral. And despite his modest protestation that he was controlled by events, the best of the Lincoln literature of our time reveals that his strong-willed decisions were ­driven by the unwavering political purpose of his life.

Read the full piece here.