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Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. By Joshua Wolf Shenk. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Pp. 350. $25.00.)
American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies. By Michael W. Kauffrnan. (New York: Random House, 2004. Pp. 508. $15.95.)
Lincoln's Melancholy argues that Lincoln was mentally ill, a victim of clinical depression that he somehow mastered and used as the spur that drove him to the presidency. Lincoln may have inherited his condition from both parents. Usually portrayed as abstinent, he drank for medicinal reasons, even quaffing champagne, and may have used opiates and cocaine. But he was definitely not homosexual, probably consorting with prostitutes while mingling in what passed for high society in provincial Springfield, Illinois.
Shenk, a gifted amateur, is sincere and well-meaning. Like claims in the past few decades that Lincoln suffered from Marfan syndrome or venereal disease (as did one-half of all American men) or that he was bisexual, this book is plausible speculation. It would make a good topic for high school debaters as its thesis cannot be proved or disproved. Shenk markets himself with a vengeance by indulging in tiresome name-dropping of various celebrities in the text. Several returned the favor with dust jacket-blurbs.
The aumor lacks professional credentials as a psychiatrist or psychologist; however, he suffers from depression himself, which evidently makes him an expert. Shenk's ignorance of history betrays him repeatedly. He thinks that the first...