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 enlarge | Author: Stephen Berry
Creator: Michael Prichard
Publisher: Tantor Media
Category: Book
List Price: $69.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 2843388
Format: Audiobook, Cd, Unabridged
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 8
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 6.5 x 1
ISBN: 1400135729
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.70922
EAN: 9781400135721
ASIN: 1400135729
Publication Date: November 19, 2007
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| Customer Reviews:
House of Abraham February 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Stephen Berry's work House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, A Family Divided by War is a wonderful addition to the field of Lincoln historiography. His work is very insightful to the machinations of the Todd family. The Todd's were truly a family divided by the Civil War and its aftermath. The work is well written and researched throughly by the author. Lincoln's extended family, i.e. the Todd's were surely an embarassment for the president and his wife. However, even though many of the Todd's were confederate sympathizers, Lincoln always was supportive of his wife's sisters. This is a fine work on Lincoln and essential for Lincolnites to read.
 A New Perspective on Lincoln? January 27, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Abraham Lincoln is one of the most-written about men in the English language. As a long-time Lincoln-buff, I don't mind that there are so many books, but I have to admit, I occasionally wonder if we've reached diminishing returns. A lot of Lincoln books are what I'd call "old wine in new bottles."
But House of Abraham really is that rare thing: a truly new and important perspective on Abraham Lincoln. Having read most of what there is on Abraham and Mary, let me just say what I think is new here: First, the author fleshes out the Southern wing of the Todd family for the first time. These are some seriously colorful characters: David Todd was arrested for desecrating corpses in a Richmond jail; Samuel Todd and Alex Todd were Confederate soldiers killed in action; George Todd abused African-American prisoners who had been taken while storming Battery Wagner; Emilie Todd, widow of a Confederate Brigadier, spent a week in the White House, despite the scandal; Margaret Todd smuggled contraband through Union lines, on and on. In all my reading I'd never known any of this.
Second, the author connects these scandals to Mary's growing unpopularity in Washington. Many books have mentioned that Mary lost three half-brothers on the rebel side (the author proves that it was only two), but none have demonstrated so clearly why her family-ties became such a problem.
Finally, while House of Abraham begins as a book about the Todds, it becomes more and more a meditation on family, on the nation as a family, and on Lincoln's evolving understanding of the War. Ultimately, the author convinced me that Lincoln saw the Todds as a microcosm of the nation and that he understood the war as a "mosaic of family crises."
As some of the other reviewers have pointed out, the book isn't very long, but considering it limits itself to saying something actually new about the most-written-about-man-in-America, I don't think that's surprising. Team of Rivals (which I loved) was 900 pages, but not that much of it was new. It was really the framing that was so impressive. In fact, I'd recommend reading Team of Rivals and then House of Abraham in succession. They make a terrific pair.
 Promising Title, Yet Ultimately Disappointing January 25, 2008
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
As someone with significant interest and education in the 19th century, I was eager to read Berry's new book. However, it didn't take me very long to realize that I would be disappointed. The topic of Lincoln and the Todds, a family divided by war, was quite promising and had the potential to add significantly to the growing historiography of more "cultural" studies of the Civil War. I am disappointed, though, that Berry was the one to tell this story.
First of all, the book is entirely too short. I fully understand Berry's comment in the opening pages that "following fourteen principal characters--and their spouses, and their children--over the course of a lifetime would be unwieldy." However, the result is a collection of random (admittedly not so random in some cases) experiences of the Todds during the Civil War. Within a given chapter, the reader is thrown from one loser Todd's experience to another loser Todd's experience to a yet another loser Todd's experience; while doing, Berry completely lacks cohesion. Furthermore, considering that the book is so short (181 pages before the very cursory epilogue), why did Berry go into as much detail as he did on the Todd's early Kentucky experience? Perhaps Berry would say we needed the background to help us understand why the Todds were so mentally imbalanced. I suppose we did need to know about Robert Smith Todd's second wife who threw a child out of a second floor window in order to understand some of the behaviors that the younger Todd generation would exhibit. But, in the end, this leaves Berry even fewer pages in which to examine the Civil War Todds.
Secondly, Abraham Lincoln is curiously a secondary character in the book until the fifth chapter ("1863: The Death of Absalom"). The fifth chapter is, by the way, quite good, but the rest of the book (both the chapters before and after it) don't remotely compare.
Finally, I found Berry's writing style to be entirely too informal with excessive colloquialisms...and the book is full of cliches! It is obvious that, in writing this book, Berry made the decision to abandon an academic audience (Berry's first book was published by Oxford University Press). This is not entirely bad. However, in so doing, Berry chose to "dumb down" the book. Some reviewers have suggested that Berry writes with authority. However, I would say that his writing often comes across as choppy at best and bordering on the ridiculous at worst.
In the final analysis, I am not suggesting that people should not read this book. However, readers must approach HOUSE OF ABRAHAM as just another book on the Civil War, not as the definitive work of this generation.
House of Abraham January 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was really and interesting book. I did not realize that the Todds and Lincolns were that closely related. Also, not not know that the Todds were deeply imbeded in Kentucky. Learn something new with every book.
The Biography of a Family January 9, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Behind every name printed in a history book there is an underlying story that is only very rarely ever told. For even kings and queens, presidents and generals, politicians and other noted historical figures who shaped the times during which they lived, all have fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and of course whose family would not be complete without an in-law or two. In short, we all know the stories of the historical figures we like to read about, but what we may not know is the stories of the members of their families. History is not made by one person alone. For every general who goes off to war, there is a father, a mother, brothers and sisters, a wife and children who are left behind, to fret, to worry, to love, to pray and to mourn. Often times I have found myself reading a biography and come across a glancing reference to this family member or that, only to be frustrated to learn nothing more of said family member. I stop my reading for a moment and wonder to myself "I wonder what their story is?" Stephen Berry's "House of Abraham: Lincoln & The Todds, A Family Divided By War," is book that answers that question.
There most certainly is no shortage of books written about Abraham and Mary (Todd) Lincoln. The Lincoln's were very complex persons whose biographies rightly take up many thousands of linear feet of shelf space in libraries all around the world. But even the best biographies of Abraham and Mary only give fleeting glimpses of the lives or their family members or the Lincoln's relationships with them. Happily this is not a problem that plagues Mr. Berry's book.
Mary Lincoln's father, Robert Smith Todd was married twice, and had fourteen children who survived into adulthood. Abraham, not close to his own family, in many ways was closer with the Todd family than his own. In large part, Lincoln's life was shaped by his relationship with the Todd's.
Upon Lincoln's election as President of the United States the country found itself ripping into two halves, as did the Todd family. Of Robert Todd's children six sided with the Union and eight sided with the Confederacy. Berry states "of necessity and by design" his book "focuses on the fates and movements of the handful of Todds about whom the most is known and with whom Lincoln had the closest association." Representing the Northern wing of the family are Elizabeth Todd & husband Ninian W. Edwards, and of course Abraham & Mary (Todd) Lincoln. The Southern wing of the family, states Berry, has never been studied, and is represented by sisters Emilie and Elodie Todd and one brother, David Todd. Though the remaining siblings do appear in the book they are often cast as secondary characters in Berry's narrative.
Todd family narrative is nearly panoramic, as members of the family seem to have been everywhere during the war. Berry places them at the very beginnings of the Civil War at the inaugurations of both Abraham Lincoln and Confederate president, Jefferson Davis; follows them to battlefields Vicksburg, Gettysburg and Chickamauga; to the prisons and hospitals of the Confederacy, and finally ends with George Todd catching up with the fleeing Confederate government after the fall of Richmond.
Berry's the narrative of the Todd family deftly draws parallels to that of the larger "American Family." As the Todd family was torn apart by the war, so was the nation. As the Todd family suffered wounds and casualties so did the nation. After the war, the Northern and Southern wings of the family struggled with issues of reunion as they tried to put their past behind them as did the nation. The narrative of the Todd family, during and after the war, is in fact, the narrative of the United States.
My only complaint with the book is its lack of scope as far as the members of the Todd family are concerned. Berry notes "This book is not a complete biography of the Todds." He goes on to say that "following fourteen principal characters - and their spouses, and their children - over the course of a lifetime would be unwieldy." For a book whose text is a brief 192 pages, that is a weak argument, but still, the book adequately fills a void that has been too long over looked.
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