TOW #16- IRB 2 Post

In TOW #12, I discussed the first half of the Biography of Abraham Lincoln, a book that 5 weeks ago, I was thoroughly interested in and it seemed to be getting better and better.  However, it seems like one teenage girl can only take so many pages about one man.  Mr. Donald is definitely a historian who has great knowledge about President Lincoln and has provided me with information about him that I may have never learned elsewhere.  Out of his two purposes, one to entertain the reader, and one to portray Lincoln as something other than the Civil War, Donald is truly only successful in the latter.  Although this may seem like the more important of the two purposes, without capturing the readers' attention, the author loses the audience of purpose, ultimately losing the basis to build the larger purpose onto.

Through the beginning of the first half of the book, Donald mainly used imagery and lengthy, detailed stories about Lincoln's childhood and early days in politics.  Then, the second half of the book was all politics, something that I'm not as much interested in as how Lincoln grew up.  At first, Donald's long stories were interesting, but soon they became boring, and I found myself wanting to skip ahead in the book to find any sort of change in plot.  Donald's use of diction is so dry, that the audience could plop it down into a history textbook without anyone noticing.  In one paragraph, Donald writes, "They were eager to get away from Washington, which Mary thought was a place filled with their enemies and which Lincoln knew was a city filled with office-seekers.  They wanted to learn how Robert was faring in the army.  And, most of all, they needed rest" (571).  These were some of the most interesting sentences that I could find.  Unfortunately, most of this biography, was written this way, with bare sentence structure, and adjectives that look like they are sick and in need of care.  With this sort of writing style, Donald makes it very difficult for the audience to stay engaged in Lincoln's story.  Perhaps, the disconnect here may just be that I did not like history as much as I thought I did.  If someone were to write a biography about Lincoln, it would be very difficult to capture the entire spirit of one of the best human beings in all of American history.  But, if you are attempting to do it, don't fill 600 pages with meaningless details and stale language.