What Lincoln Said - Hardcover

Direct quotes from Lincoln enliven the concise text in this picture-book biography of the sixteenth president of the U.S. Thomson follows Lincoln from his Illinois boyhood to the moment he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. With admirable simplicity, Thomson distills the historical facts into short, smoothly paced sentences that present the issues for a very young audience. Thomson defines the term slave, for example, as “human beings treated like animals: forced to work, bought and sold, chained, beaten.” In his illustrator’s note, Ransome acknowledges that he “elongated or exaggerated” body parts “to elaborate the text,” and his brightly colored, acrylic portraits certainly veer into caricature. In an opening page, for example, a young Lincoln is portrayed as a wide-eyed, grinning goofball; in other spreads, his outsize ears dominate the image. The effects are mixed, but at their best, the pictures humanize their subject, and elementary teachers will appreciate this brief overview of Lincoln’s accomplishments, which are further explored in a time line and an author’s note. One glaring omission: there are no sources given for Lincoln’s quotes. Grades K-3. --Gillian Engberg