Can anyone recommend a biography on Abraham Lincoln?

by HanSoloHeadBeg

Title says it all, but I'll expand further.

I'm looking for a book on Lincoln and assuming that most comprehensive biographies cover his time during the Civil War. Can anyone provide a list of 1-5, in no particular order?

Additionally, it should be noted that I live in Ireland, so it would be handy to have books recommended that I can order from Europe (UK shipping is a nightmare at the moment).

Thanks!

indyobserver

Eric Foner is fond of saying that at over 60,000 books, there are more titles published on the American Civil War than there have been days since it. As a result, the Lincoln literature is beyond immense and there's not a single moment of his life that doesn't have multiple volumes written about it.

I'm presuming you're going for a general biography rather than something specific like how he would go to the Soldiers' Home for vacations or spent his one term in the House (there are indeed books on those subjects). If so, I'd agree with three recommendations from our booklist, which are the massive Michael Burlingame biography Abraham Lincoln: A Life and David Donald's Lincoln, which is probably considered the best single volume of recent years, and the Foner book on Lincoln's history with slavery, The Fiery Trial.

To that, I'd probably add the Gienapp book, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America, the Sidney Blumenthal trilogy starting with A Self-Made Man, and even the old Carl Sandburg books, which were the standard popular biography for decades. The last has been surpassed long ago, but they're still valuable to see where someone who could be brutally ruthless in the execution of power had those edges sanded down (although in fairness that started with the Herndon and Hay biographies in the years following his death.)

No idea what's available in Europe, but I think almost everything that I've recommended has ebooks available someplace.