“Some 16,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln,” Gordon Wood writes in The Wall Street Journal, “more than any other historical figure except Jesus.” So why should you read one more? Because “there has never been one like this one.” In Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, David S. Reynolds has written “a marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness”:

Lincoln, like Whitman and Brown, was a product of his times; and those times were wild. Whatever we might think about the divisiveness, partisanship and violence of our own era, it is nothing compared to antebellum America. Government in the first half of the 19th century was weak and unstructured, and established institutions were few and far between. The economy was diffuse and unmanageable: Thousands of different kinds of paper-money notes flew about, and risk-taking and bankruptcies were everywhere; even some states went bankrupt. This was a rough-and-tumble world, and duels, rioting and mobbing were commonplace. Alcohol flowed freely, and Americans were drinking more per capita than nearly all other nations, which provoked desperate temperance movements. Fistfights, knifings and other explosions of violence seemed to be ordinary affairs, taking place even in state legislatures and the Congress. Public rhetoric was abrasive and harsh, and zany humor and sensationalism flourished in the popular press; people were especially eager to read lurid reports of suicides. The nervous nation was coming apart, torn by sectional conflict and the struggle over slavery.

This was the disordered and unruly world Lincoln experienced. The future president was born in 1809, and possessed a natural intelligence, an easygoing temperament, an incredible memory and a sense of ‘innate fairness.’ He became unusually tall and strong, which was helpful in the brawling world in which he grew up. But everything else about him he absorbed and adapted from his environment. Far from distancing himself from the wild world of antebellum America, Lincoln, says Mr. Reynolds, ‘was thoroughly immersed in it.’ After he assumed the presidency, he was able to redefine democracy for his fellow Americans ‘precisely because he had experienced culture in all its dimensions—from high to low, sacred to profane, conservative to radical, sentimental to subversive.’

Much of Lincoln’s greatness, writes Mr. Reynolds, came from his ability to tap into this culture. He was able to respond thoughtfully to the teeming chaos of antebellum America. Lincoln was less a self-made man than an America-made man. He told his law partner, William Herndon, ‘Conditions make the man and not man the conditions.’ But, according to Herndon, Lincoln also ‘believed firmly in the power of human effort to modify the environments which surround us.’ Indeed, his capacity to shape the world around him was crucial to his life and to the life of the nation.

In other news: France is divided over calls for Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine to be reburied in the Panthéon: “The secular mausoleum is home to French greats including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Zola, Alexandre Dumas and Marie Curie. Now a petition signed by more than 5,000 people, including culture minister Roselyne Bachelot and a host of her predecessors, is calling on president Emmanuel Macron to allow Rimbaud and Verlaine to join them.” The petition says Rimbaud and Verlaine should be moved for two reasons: their greatness and homosexuality. “The petition highlights how the poets are symbols of diversity who ‘had to endure the relentless “homophobia” of their time’, describing them as ‘the French Oscar Wildes’.” I disagree on both counts. Rimbaud is not great, and Verlaine is only occasionally good. You all know what I think of honoring artists for diversity alone, but in this case, it’s not even that. It’d be honoring them for a fling. I’m not the only one who thinks so: “Jacqueline Teissier-Rimbaud, the great-grand-niece of the poet, has stated her opposition to the plans, telling the press that ‘Rimbaud did not start his life with Verlaine and did not end it with him, these are just a few years of his youth’, while the association Les Amis de Rimbaud is also against the plans. A counterpetition, which had 439 signatories at time of writing, is calling on Macron to keep the poets where they are, and not fall into the ‘trap of political correctness’.”

Bedwyr Ab Ion Thomas is writing his doctoral dissertation in medicinal chemistry in Welsh. It’s not easy: “While many literal translations of the requisite English terms may exist in Welsh, these translations often don’t make sense when directly transposed from one language to the other. As a result, Thomas has had to invent entirely new words, building a Welsh-language dictionary of terms that pertain to his topic. He will continue this process while conducting his research and earning his degree, and he will eventually submit his dictionary to the Welsh language experts for review.”

During the golden age of English-language comics neither Marvel nor DC reigned supreme. EC was king: “A new, lavishly illustrated volume (pictured)—written by EC aficionado-cum-archivist Grant Geissman and published by Taschen, an art-book specialist—seeks to make that memory into something more solid. The History Of EC Comics divides its account into three distinct eras that span the lives of two men: founder Maxwell Gaines, and his son, William. Max and Bill, as they were known, were contrasting types. Max, pithily summarised as a ‘hard-nosed, pain-wracked, loud, aggressive man’, was a dynamic opportunist. Born into a family of Jewish immigrants, he was driven to drag himself up by the bootstraps . . . without whom there would be no comic-book industry, nor a Hollywood to make films out of its characters.”

David Pryce-Jones remembers Lali and Freddy Horstmann: “Lali (1898–1954) and Freddy Horstmann (1879–1947) were a privileged German couple, aesthetes who in the 1930s wished to live without taking any notice of Hitler and Nazism. Conspiracy against Hitler was not for them. At any point in the Nazi period, they could have left the country and sought safety abroad. Instead, for reasons that seemed sound to them, they stayed, consoling themselves with the thought that the tyranny would soon pass, as tyrannies do. This misjudgment was fatal. One of the profound themes of classical tragedy is that those who make wrong decisions will have to pay for them, being authors of their own misfortune. Written directly, without art or pretension, Nothing for Tears, Lali’s one and only book (1953, republished 2000), is testimony to a disastrous moment in the history of Europe, and, more than that, it has the same sort of truthfulness about the human condition as an Aeschylus play.”

A. M. Juster talks to Trinity House Review about translation, poetry today, and his new collection, Wonder and Wrath: “I am not a big fan of poetry about the partisan politics of the moment, such as Calvin Trillin’s epigrams in The Nation. Such poems tend to be painfully predictable and become rapidly less interesting as the election cycle tumbles along. The greatest political poetry from Horace to Yeats, Auden, Walcott, Szymborska and Zagajewski ignores the specific disputes of the time and focuses on our successes and failures as political beings. Important political poetry also comes from poets, such as Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry, and Terrance Hayes, whose pervasive ideologies provide new lenses for viewing the world.”

Agatha Christie’s mysteries are as modern as they are Edwardian, Laura Thompson writes: “The received opinion was that her novels were suspended in a never-never land wherein change did not penetrate. Her public image, of the upper-middle-class Torquay-born matron plotting bloodless murders over the Crown Derby, merely reinforced this view; and so, on the face of it, does the creation of Bertram’s Hotel. Miss Marple is visiting in a spirit of à la recherche, having stayed there as a girl, and her memories of Edwardian London – the Army and Navy stores, a four-wheeler to a theatre matinée – are those of her creator. Is she, therefore, a mouthpiece for Christie’s own desire to retreat from the world of Harold Wilson into one of deferential maids and ‘not a bit of plastic in the place’? Not quite.”

Partying with Tina Brown and the late Harry Evans: “There was usually a guest of honor and more often than not, the peg (as it’s called in journalism) was a book, like Simon Schama and The Story of the Jews, published in 2014. Or a victory, like the Labour candidate Tony Blair’s election to prime minister in 1997. The morning of a party, Mr. Evans and Ms. Brown would head to the Sutton Cafe, on First Avenue, where they’d eat breakfast, and read about 14 newspapers. Then, they would come home and Mr. Evans would play Ping-Pong before jumping into the bath, where he’d spend a few hours reading the book being celebrated and prepare his toast. She worked on the seating arrangements.”

Photo: Mattsee