Lincoln's Melancholy

[Gene C]

Just finished reading this, and it is interesting. Written by Joshua Wolf Sheen in 2005, it's about 243 pages long with another 50+ pages of notes. While I don't agree with all of it, and feel the writer may have over estimated or emphasized Lincoln's "Melancholy", no doubt Lincoln had some bouts with depression, and dealt with them. There is a lot of material here, a bit challenging for me to take it all in. It appears to be well researched.

This statement from the first chapter,
"Three elements of Lincoln's history, the deep, pervasive sadness of his mother, the strange spells of his father, and the striking presence of mental illness in the family of his uncle and cousins - suggest the likelihood of a biological predisposition towards depression.".

Interesting comment, but I wasn't convinced totally regarding these three items.

I found this statement interesting (p15)
"...in the early nineteenth century, one out of four infants died before their first birthday. And about one fourth of all children lost a mother or father before age fifteen."

Lincoln seems pretty free at writing and discussing how he feels with his good friend Joshua Speed, but when Speed moves away, and Lincoln get's married, that intimate look into his thoughts and feelings disappears, and several people mention how private Lincoln is about his feelings. This changes again when he is President, but so do the challenges he has to face, and due in part to his untimely death, his personality is examined more closely.

I found the last chapter of the book very interesting "What Everybody Knows". It deals with Herndon, Ann Rutledge and the legends of their romance, authors James and Ruth Randall, and comments about psycho-biographies and the changes of more modern writers in the approach in writing about Lincoln.

All in all it's a good book, but it's tough to "get inside" anyone's head, let alone someone who lived 150-200 years ago. It's a subjective book, there is so much here it's a bit of a challenge for me to comment on it. I think it's better than the Lincoln's Quest for Union by Charles Strozier. I can recommend this one, very reasonably priced.
https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancho...Melancholy