Abraham Lincoln

Someday, I’d like to see the Lincoln Memorial. I’m well aware that the civic mythology wound around Abraham Lincoln lends him a godlike aura that, surely, no living man could justify. And yet, even making due allowance for time’s apotheosizing foliage, he remains for me a beacon lighting the way toward the ideals America struggles so imperfectly to realize.

Benjamin P. Thomas’s one-volume biography of Lincoln was a bestseller, and is still considered a classic both of readability and scholarship. Although Thomas was a professional American academic, he took a colleague’s advice on entering into study of Lincoln: rather than burying himself in tomes and monographs, he started with a study of Lincoln’s own words.

I take this as show more part of the reason this biography reads so well. Lincoln was, more than any president before him, a man of the people. He knew what it meant to break your back laboring for just enough to eat. Despite his intellectual talents and political triumphs, Lincoln never lost his common touch or his gift for turning a phrase in just the right way to catch an everyday ear.

Thomas honored Lincoln’s facility with words by turning out a volume that speaks as simply as the Great Persuader himself. Thomas clearly also felt a bond with his subject, writing as he did in sympathy with the rising Civil Rights movement. In a rare authorial aside, he writes, “Douglas conceded that the Negro was entitled to certain rights and privileges. But, he asserted, in the manner of some persons of our own time, these must be determined by the white people of each state and territory…”

The sixteenth president died by the hand of an assassin at the age of 56, and his biographer died by his own hand at the age of 54. Four days after Thanksgiving in 1956, Benjamin P. Thomas received a diagnosis of terminal throat cancer. Three days later, he ended his life to spare his family a pointless ordeal. Thomas’s end was as tragic as his subject’s, and both left legacies. Abraham Lincoln breathes again in these pages, a unique and enigmatic man at a crux of history, burdened by a melancholy he could never shake, bearing a future he would never know. show less

Well written biography. Lacking in all policy matters outside of the Civil War though. Would be nice to know more economic policies of Lincoln.

2486 Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, by Benjamin P. Thomas (read 22 Jan 1993) This is considered the best one-volume biography of Lincoln, so I read it. It was published in 1952. I found the chapters on Lincoln's early life absorbing and most enjoyable. The later life has been the subject of so much I have read recently--antebellum years and the Civil War--that it seemed well-trodden territory to me. The book presents a good appreciation of Lincoln, and I concur in its view. An excellent book.

This was a book I found in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble. I think it does a good job of showing how much of the country's burden Lincoln bore and what courage he displayed. Truly a pheomenal man, and probably our greatest President.

All the things that contributed to the making of a great man; uninsightful and dull

Older work that is still one of the best biographies on Lincoln.