National Review, April 8th, 1996
REMARKABLE as it is to say, two books have appeared now within a year of each other that might well retain full authority a hundred years hence and thus meet Samuel Johnson's criterion for a classic. One is Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (reviewed in NR March 6, 1995). The other is David Herbert Donald's Abraham Lincoln.
Donald's biography has the stylistic qualities of a Doric column. Its sentences need no ornamentation for their power. They speak with the authority of enormous accumulated knowledge, yet bear it lightly.
Donald, a prodigious scholar, ha...
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