1060 Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Volume One, by Carl Sandburg (read 11 Jul 1970) This is the first of six volumes by Sandburg on Lincoln. It takes Lincoln up to about 1850. It is good, but I miss the footnotes and the trappings of a real biography. So I won't go on--now--to volume II. Sandburg is no lawyer--I should read a book on Lincoln the lawyer. But the picture evoked of the early West in Lincoln's time is a strange and poignant one. One wonders how Lincoln could be the great man he was: what elements in him caused it? Even a poet:
"My childhood's home I see again
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.
O Memory! thou midway world
Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise." ( )