Cheryl Truman on books

Lincoln books seem an infinitely renewable resource. So, when the time comes, skip the moisture-resistant shiny enclosure. Put a few Lincoln books below, a few above, then shovel some earth. Plant a tree. Play Bette Midler’s Shiver Me Timbers. I’ll go happy.

Really, the Lincoln biography industry seems to be one thing that’s booming in America. List it on the stock market, and you’d see investors come down quickly off this Apocalypse Dow mentality.

A few new contenders in the Lincoln literary sweepstakes:

–The children’s book Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered (by Barry Denenberg, illustrated by Christopher Bing, Fiewel and Friends, $24.95) is simply appealing as all get-out; if I were a child, or still had young children, I would read this every dya. And it wold be easy enough to find: It’s 17 inches tall. And although this is plainly schoolbook Lincoln for those who may have just graduated Sesame Street, it’s a guilty pleasure for adults as well. Key Lincoln quote: ” … It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a simple sentence … the short and simple annals of the poor.”

Nice touch: Four photos of Lincoln, 1860-1865, lined up on page 35. He begins looking rugged, and ends looking rugged and ghastly.

–The upcoming A. Lincoln: A Biography by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, upcoming in January, 2009), is being touted as the best biography of Lincoln since David Donald’s Lincoln, which is like saying that the gold standard is being updated. A lovely quote from the Chicago Press and Tribune teaches the always appropriate, always forgotten lesson that in politics, demise is a temporary phenomenon. It’s from November 10, 1858, when Lincoln was in fact far from finished, and it’s the sort of thing you think Hillary Clinton may have framed on a wall somewhere: “Mr. Lincoln is beaten. We know of no better time than the present to congratulate him on the memorable and brilliant canvas he has made. He has created for himself a national reputation that is both envied and deserved; and though he should hereafter fill no official station, he has done the cause of Truth and Justice what will always entitle him to the gratitude of his party … ”

–Who’s your phrasemaker? Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (HarperCollins, October 28 $27.95) by Fred Kaplan, falls more in the range of 2006’s Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words, by Douglas L. Wilson. It begins with little Abe attending his first school, in Hardin County, Kentucky. Kaplan takes no prisoners in his introduction, in which he observes that “Lincoln was also the last president whose character and standards in the use of language avoided the distortions and other dishonest uses of language that have done so much to undermine the credibility of national leaders.” Any citizen who has suffered through the verbal swill of this year’s campaigns, both national and state, can appreciate that. In Kentucky alone, our U.S. Senate ads are toxic enough that they will have to be eventually disposed of by hazmat teams.