A review by mark_cc
Lincoln by David Herbert Donald

3.0

FINALLY. This focused a little too tightly on Lincoln and ignored some of the larger historical context I would have been interested in (though that probably isn't a terribly legitimate criticism of a biography). The other main thing I noticed is that the book describes Mary Todd Lincoln like an absolute disaster. I'm not sure if it was the book, an artifact of how the primary sources (and the era's sexisms) describe her, or if she was actually a wreck, but I did not feel like she got a fair shake.