Books, Arts & Manners: Before Silence Descends

Abraham Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald (Simon & Schuster, 714 pp., $35)

Remarkable as it is to say, two books have appeared now within a year of each other that might well retain full authority a hundred years hence and thus meet Samuel Johnson’s criterion for a classic. One is Donald Kagan’s On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (reviewed in NR March 6, 1995). The other is David Herbert Donald’s Abraham Lincoln.