Founder's Son

Many years ago I wrote an article for a well-known magazine saying that the outstanding writers of our time were historians and biographers, and that the best were much more deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature than the novelists who typically win. Within a short list I included, I mentioned historian and biographer Richard Brookhiser as one worthy of the award. While my editor removed Brookhiser's name, I find myself more persuaded of my earlier opinion after reading his latest book.

Principally known for short, elegantly composed biographies about our nation's founding fathers, Brookhiser has written his latest, Founder's Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, about the life of the Great Emancipator. True to its title, it re-tells Lincoln's story as it explains his relation to various fathers.

The first of these was his biological father, Thomas Lincoln, someone Honest Abe resented and looked down upon. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest were a second set of fathers for Lincoln, intellectual fathers whom he studied and interpreted both for himself and for the nation in his speeches and his letters. A final and very important father figure for a man named after the Bible's most ancient patriarch, of course, was the Supreme Being, and Brookhiser shows in this wonderfully readable book how Lincoln's views of God shifted and evolved over the years.

Brookhiser has said that he looks to Plutarch's Lives as models. Like them, his books are not masses of facts and data, and they do not qualify every opinion expressed. Rather, they are stories that look to the telling detail as a means to illustrate and enlighten. Once more, Brookhiser does this singularly well.

In this way, he brings us a very human figure: a president who is ambitious but mournful, witty and full of kindness but fateful and despairing.

Since I first aimed to write admiringly of Brookhiser, I must note that I have come to know him somewhat, and, as such, I think I am partly qualified to suggest that his ability to bring his subject to life may be a consequence of some kinship between two gifted writers; both are mordant wits and of occasionally saturnine nature.

But I must render one meaningful criticism. Brookhiser ends his story by suggesting that if Lincoln had lived, he would have effected a more successful Reconstruction. Granted the recalcitrance of the former Confederate states, the cost of Reconstruction and the limited tax power of the federal government at the time, I have to wonder to what degree this is so.

Regardless, I hope readers will pick up this magisterial book.