Saturday, December 18, 2010

Lincoln's Mothers: by Dorothy Clarke Wilson.

A very good book about some very good people, nice to read, and leaves one with a good feeling suffusing one's heart.

Lincoln spoke about his mother, and most people understood it to be about his birth mother who died soon after. The author here questions that automatic assumption, and while makes no dispute about someone who gave life to such a great man, hypothesises that it might in fact have been about his stepmother who influenced him and was responsible for encouraging his aspirations of reading and learning despite the harsh frontier life of Illinois - Indiana - Kentucky border where his future wife was brought up in a mansion in style with slaves while he lived in a log cabin.