LINCOLN - Fred Kaplan

I have a little black book--a habit I picked up from Gerry Oehm and my son Nate--in which I write the titles of books I mean to read, cool web sites I've heard tell of, interesting quotes, etc. Whenever I go to The Tattered Cover to check out books--usually the beginning of each month--I bring along my little book. When I buy a book off my list, I check it off. I've learned long ago that while I can remember long passages from books I've read, I can't remember the titles, or much of the content for that matter, and so I end up buying the same books. If I check it off I can guard against that rather expensive habit. After I've actually read the book I usually put in a comment--something as cryptic as a smiley face or as long as a sentence or two.

Occasionally a book will jump off the racks at me that I haven't written in my book. I trust my memory enough to assume that the book has jumped at me because I had read something or heard something about it that made an impression. Therefore, I usually end up buying the titles that fall in this category.

Lincoln The Biography of a Writer is such a book. When I saw the book a month ago I remembered that Obama had taken it with him to Hawaii and I had a vague memory (one that has turned out to be false) that it was featured on "The Daily Show," so I bought it.

Fred Kaplan takes an interesting approach to Lincoln. Following him from his log splitting youth to four days before his assasination, the book single-mindedly looks at Lincoln's life through the prism of his writing. The result is a totally different look at a great man. It devotes as much attention to Lincoln's formative essays, short stories, and poems when he was a young man and fledgling state congressman, as it does to the writings we all know about. You know, the ones that are chiseled over and around his statue.

I'm not sure I like the result of this approach. A lot of Lincoln's writing was sophomoric at best and downright libelous at worst. Kaplan spends a lot of time analyzing many of the young congressman's anonymous satirical pieces attacking his political opponents. It is disturbing to realize that Lincoln's use of spin was no less deceitful and hateful than a lot of the stuff we hear on Fox News.

Lincoln comes away from all of this not so much as a great man as an opportunistic pragmatist who happened to have a way with words. A man who always seemed to be coming out of a severe bout with depression. A man who married into relative wealth and position, but who took every opportunity he could to be away from his bi-polar wife.

Having learned all of this about Lincoln, if I lived in 1860 I'm not sure I could have voted for the guy.

You can tell I'm not wild about this book. It just reads too much like some weird doctoral dissertation analyzing how specific lines from Shakespeare inform Lincoln's published letters, speeches, and essays.

For example, Kaplan examines Lincoln's nearly suicidal reaction to Ann Rutledge's death:

All the self-tormenting demons of depressive melancholy that were deep in his consciousness, the languages of Gothic and Romantic despair from Gray's churchyard to Byron's "Darkness," had to be part of his brooding self-flagellation. He had indeed been reading Byron that autumn . . . Shakespeare's "Hamlet" was an available corollary. . .

The idea that his grief was in part a product of his reading of Byron and that his suicidal impulses were inspired by Hamlet seems something of a stretch to me. I guess now that I no longer make my living by analyzing things to death, I don't enjoy seeing others do it as much as I used to.

I'm going to go read something fun.