I gave up halfway through. The story of the megarich collector of memorabilia was a turnoff in itself, but the book really began dragging by then as well.

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I was very disappointed in this audio book. I consider Lincoln to be one of our greatest presidents, if not the greatest, an opinion reinforced by the recent Spielberg movie. This book , according to one of the cover blurbs, purports to be "A fresh look at Abraham Lincoln and his impact on our country" (Shame on you, Doris Kearns Goodwin - a Lincoln scholar in your own right - for issuing such a wishy-washy and misleading blurb!).

I found it to be mostly depressing - in fact I only listened to the first five or six of the nine cd's; couldn't stand any more. The book appears to be mostly an examination of Abraham Lincoln mania and the commercialization of the Lincoln myth. There's a chapter on the furor over an AL statue erected in Richmond. There's a very depressing chapter on the ALPLAM (Abraham Lincoln Plesidential Library and Museum in Springfield IL) - a blatant attempt to present AL as Walt Disney character which is supposed to attract more teenagers.

There are a couple chapters on the greatest collectors of Lincoln memorabili - who have spent immense sums of money on bloody rags from the assasination, Lincoln's chamber pot, and Mary Todd Lincoln's underpants, among other things. I finally gave up in the middle of a chapter about a society of people who dress up as AL and Mary Todd L for comercial reasons.

The audio book is not put together as well as it could be; maybe the producers were as bored with it as I was. One of the disks ends in Springfield IL and the next starts in Beverly Hills without any introduction to the new chapter; I wasted time flipping from one cd to another to see if I had skipped one.

I got a kick out of the voice of the reader, sort of a raspy tenor - a dead ringer for Richard Sanders, who played Les Nessman, the paranoid newscaster on the long-running TV series "WKRP in Cincinatti", which I have been watching recently in reruns - certainly a lot more entertaining than this book.

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