Professor Burlingame employs the following unusual (to undersigned) structure in his book: (1) Event. (2) Reaction to event by contemporaries: colleagues, personal acquaintances, newspaper articles. An immense number of contemporary newspaper articles. The structure means that this is no narrative of Lincoln's life, there is little flow. Rather, the life is atomized and then concatenated. Too, very seldom does Burlingame edify us with his own judgment. The last page and one half is more than one gets in the previous 832 pages. The book is in no sense "Burlingame's Lincoln." There are a lot of well-researched reactions to the components of Lincoln's life, though.
