‘Another damn’d, thick square book!” groused the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon on the publication of a volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and one might at first feel similarly about Richard Brookhiser’s much slimmer Founders’ Son. After all, as any reviewer is duty-bound to tell you, more has been written about Abraham Lincoln than anyone else, with the possible exception of Jesus Christ (and he had a 2,000-year head start).
And there is plenty of strong competition. If the Lincoln literature is a forest, a few trees loom larger than the rest. Three biographies in particular stand out: that by Lord Charnwood, an English aristocrat and politician with near-clairvoyant insight into Lincoln’s character; the one by Benjamin Thomas, whose Lincolnesque prose suavely conveyed interpretations that remain evergreen; and Michael Burlingame’s Brobdingnagian two-volume feast, informed by a lifetime of research and offering acute psychological insight.
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