James C. Humes (1934–2020)

A very selective group of quotes and anecdotes about the 16th president; every quote appeared to be selected to support the political view of the author, who also included a lot of anecdotes about the late president that he collected entirely from secondary sources; his bibliography does not list a single primary source, which probably explains some of the anecdotes, almost certainly apocryphal. There is very little reason to believe that many of these anecdotes are true; they are the legends that spring up around great men, and some of them are in the "too good to be true" category. Also present are the "too strange to be true" and, interestingly, "too banal to be true". The quotes contain some good stuff, but also some questionable things that seem to have sprung up later and been attributed to Lincoln. The anecdotes are focused mostly on asserting the true extent of his conservative values, demonstrating him as an evangelical Christian (highly doubtful) and establishing him as a mystic, or perhaps a better word would be psychic, which showed in the collection of anecdotes rather than in any of the commentary by the author himself. In short, it falls very short of the solid, objective work it pretends to be.… (mais)

I felt I needed a distracting read that didn't take too much brainpower and this certainly fit the bill. Mr. Humes has a lengthy CV, but is a tad myopic in his adorations...the "Great Communicator" {snort} Reagan (Humes wrote for him, Eisenhower, Nixon, ...), but more Churchill (Humes authored a biography...) than anything. Count half of this as having value, less for experienced speakers, slightly more for inexperienced. A few nuggets are good advice, but most of this is just extraneous stories to fluff out his list.… (mais)