Reviews for Lincoln

The average rating for Lincoln based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-01 00:00:00 Jeanette Mccarthy This was superficial and glib, and not in a good way. Because Jan Morris can give good glib; but not here. And so much of what is written here is just wrong, little things and big things. A little thing: when she finally gets around to talking about Ulysses S. Grant, she calls him Ulysses Simpson Grant. But the "S" didn't stand for anything, was just a clerical mistake. A less little thing: Morris visits the cabin at City Point that Grant shared with his wife and six year-old son near War's end, and she felt it still smelt of cigar smoke and whiskey. Yet, although an alcoholic, Grant famously never drank in front of his wife. A little bigger thing: Morris writes that Lincoln was sexually complex, possibly gay, and almost certainly bisexual, and likely Stephen Douglas's lover. There is as much evidence for any of these assertions as, as, as, as there is that the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was rife with massive voter fraud. But then Morris does not pretend to be an academic historian. (There is no bibliography and the only work she mentions is Carl Sandburg's, which is more art than scholarship.) She settles in to a place, looks around, then gives her impressions, usually with a gifted purchase on the language. She did that here, first arriving - and settling with her family - in the American South in the 1950s. She looked around and saw "white trash." And she extrapolates: If Lincoln were to be born today, he would be born in a mobile home. Morris admits to writing this with a sense of European superiority, observing things "slightly de haut en bas." And that comes through. The danger though for would-be de Tocquevilles, it seems to me, is to misjudge the vastness and the pockets of this country, the complexities of the people. If one insists on saying America is this or Americans are that, then the sayer will have gotten it wrong. And so, when Morris concludes that Americans of the 1950s revered Lincoln and that Americans fifty years later held him in disrepute, I see she was largely convinced by a conversation she had on a street corner with one woman waiting for a bus and by one fifteen year-old's online post. And that saddened me. Still, Morris could enchant me with a sweet turn-of-phrase and the wise observation, like this one: If Shakespeare had written a play about Lincoln -- if only! -- it would not have been one of his history plays, but one of his dark tragedies, full of ghosts and premonitions. Yes, if only! ----- ----- ----- ----- So I got to the end and found that Jan Morris was not surprised at my disappointment. She referenced an Edward R. Murrow quotation that she cherished, one he used as a reply for fractious critics. And, speaking perhaps to me, she wrote: I have often used it myself, and when readers of this book remonstrate with me about misjudgments, or misinterpretations, or misunderstandings of the American way, or if that lady in the California cafe on page 17 chances to come across these conclusions, I shall fall back once again on its formula. Dear Sir or Madam, I shall say as Murrow did, you may be right. Yes, and Rest in Peace, Jan Morris, for you may after all be right.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-28 00:00:00 Shannon Lange Like grape jelly, the obsession with Abraham Lincoln was something about American life that world traveller Jan Morris could never understand. Here she sets out to discover the melange of history and myth that composes the 16th president. She succeeds remarkably well in giving not only the salient facts of Lincoln’s life but also a fair assessment of his character, in a lighthearted and accessible book that has neither the heft nor the heavy-going tone of a standard biography. Her discussion of his rhetorical style is especially good. In a few passages she imagines the reader into scenes, as when “Mr. and Mrs. Smith of Liverpool” turn up at the White House and find Abe playing with kittens in his stockinged feet. Here are a few of the best pithy observations: He might be a bookworm and an oddball, but he was a practiced slow teller of homespun jokes, occasionally scatological (probably in the fart-and-turd kind) He was an unassuming but not, I think, a modest man. He always talked of his plainness, but I suspect he protested too much: he surely knew that his unmistakable face was one of his great assets, and he was never indifferent to publicity—in his pockets when he died they found eight laudatory press cuttings. He was essentially a nice man. Academic historians cannot allow themselves such flip idiomatic judgments, but to an outsider like me that seems about the truth of it. He was a nice man. He could be scheming, irritable, disingenuous, but he was never pompous or overbearing. [Karl Marx called him “one of the few men who became great while remaining good.”] [Bought for $3.99 at Wonder Book and Video, Frederick, Maryland.]