Lively Lincoln

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (548 pp.) -- Benjamin P. Thomas--Knopf ($5.75).

LINCOLN FINDS A GENERAL, VOL. Ill (585 pp.)--Kenneth P. Williams--Mocmillan ($7.50).

Nearly 90 years after his death--and with some 5,000 books already published about him--Abraham Lincoln is still one of the livest subjects in U.S. letters. So far this year, twelve new books about him have appeared, and several more are already in sight for 1953. Side by side with the inevitable dust-catchers are a few standouts that ought to have just as much appeal for the general reader as for Lincoln students.

Kinks in the Legend. To Benjamin P. Thomas, a college-professor-turned-Illinois-cattleman, and a lifetime Lincoln scholar, goes the distinction of writing the best one-volume life of Lincoln since Lord Charnwood's version of 1916. Thomas' Abraham Lincoln aims for no surprises yet achieves a pleasant one: a Lincoln who has stature without being a statue. Simple and straightforward in his storytelling, Biographer Thomas tries to straighten out some factual kinks in the Lincoln legend.

Mary Todd Lincoln, he suggests, was no neurotic Xanthippe forever needling her husband. The Lincolns had their discords, but they also had a working marriage, grounded on mutual respect and affection. As for Lincoln's carrying a lifelong torch for Ann Rutledge, Author Thomas is the firmest if not the first biographer to toss that romantic notion in the historical wastebasket. Furthermore, though Lincoln once wrote: "I must, in candor, say I do not think I am fit for the presidency," he was never, according to Author Thomas, a really reluctant candidate for any of the offices for which he ran. He relished the rough & tumble of practical politics and early learned the lesson which political purists never learn: "The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good."

Deuces & a Genius. Lincoln Finds a General is the third volume in Kenneth P. Williams' excellent study of Northern generalship in the Civil War. Through it runs more of the problem that was to plague Lincoln until U.S. Grant was made general in chief: command indecision. Williams' first two volumes concentrated on the war in the east. Volume III back-treads, picks up Grant working in his father's hardware store in Galena, 111., and plants him, after a year's seasoning in skirmishes and battles, on the bloody field of Shiloh, where his aggressive persistence broke the enemy's lines. But in April 1862, Lincoln did not know that he had a fighting genius in the field; he was still shuffling the deuces in his deck of generals--in this volume, a Halleck for a McClellan.

Essentially an account of the sluggish river war in the West along the Cumberland, the Mississippi and the Tennessee, the third volume of Lincoln Finds a General lacks the dash and drama of the first two. But it proves again that Kenneth Williams, mathematics professor at the University of Indiana, can add up the score on a battle so that it makes more crisp and vivid sense to a modern reader than it ever did to the soldiers who fought it.

Other Lincolniana:

P:Lincoln the President: Midstream, by J. G. Randall. The third volume of a rambling but reflective biography, begun in 1937, which this time focuses on 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation.

P:Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life, by Stefan Lorant. A labor of photographic love, consisting of sketches, cartoons and every known* picture ever taken of Lincoln (500), with running commentary by a Lincoln enthusiast who first discovered his hero when he read the Gettysburg address in a German concentration camp.

P:Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War, by Marquis Adolphe de Chambrun. The impact of Lincoln on a sophisticated French diplomat, married to Lafayette's granddaughter, who was sent to Washington late in 1864; chiefly interesting for such minor sidelights as Vice President Andrew Johnson, a generally abstemious man, turning up in his cups (too much brandy) at Lincoln's second inaugural. P:The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, a nine-volume key to the current Lincoln boom scheduled for publication next February, which will contain 99% of all known Lincoln material, sell for $115 (prepublication price: $95), and boast such items as an index to 200 Lincoln forgeries.

*Author Lorant does not accept the Mathew Brady picture of the tall man in the stovepipe hat at Hanover Junction (TIME, Oct. 20) as a photograph of Lincoln (see LETTERS).

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