Lincoln’s legacy lives on Abraham Lincoln was born in February of 1809, in humble surroundings. When he was assassinated 56 years later, he was one of the most famous human beings on earth. Even Uncle Sam himself had gradually evolved into a Lincolnesque figure. To this day Lincoln is the supreme deity in American mythology, and his profile on the penny is the most frequently reproduced portrait in the world. In an author’s note at the front of Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest (Simon ∧ Schuster, $23, 0684855151), Jan Morris offers respectful and apologetic gratitude to the living and dead scholars upon whose work she built her own. Perhaps they should thank her instead. Many historians have written about Lincoln, but few have brought the man and his times alive so vividly as Morris does in this 200-page book. She waves her imagination across the dry old facts and they stand up and dance.

Jan Morris first visited the United States during the 1950s, when Lincoln idolatry was at its peak. Over the years Morris remained skeptical but intrigued. Finally, in the late 1990s, she visited contemporary Springfield, researched the city as it was in Lincoln’s time, and wrote about both experiences. She did the same with Gettysburg and Washington and the prairie countryside. The result is this splendid book.

Lincoln rose above his humble origins by becoming a lawyer and a legislator. According to Morris, Lincoln, like many ambitious politicians, made shady deals, rewarded patronage, and made empty promises. Only later, as president, when he had nowhere else to climb and his perpetual melancholy and Shakespearean outlook grew into a sense of destiny, did he rise to the occasion and become an Emersonian great man. Morris’s account of this personal growth is riveting. Although Lincoln never lost his taste for cheap jokes, gradually he replaced the stilted rhetoric of his early years with sinewy prose of almost Elizabethan grandeur.

Morris’s description of slavery also helps bring to life the era and its issues, from the horrors of punishment to the appeal of the genteel slave-based culture of the South. Although in time he opposed slavery, Lincoln considered blacks decidedly inferior and dreamed of their repatriation to their native lands or segregation in a separate colony. Skeptical at first, always objective, Morris nonetheless grew to like her subject. Ultimately she decides that the contradictory aspects of Lincoln’s personality may be resolved by accepting that he was by nature as much an artist as anything else. The moods, the contradictions, the evasiveness, the questioning of accepted truths, the playacting, the sexual complexity, the sad resolution, and the power to move the spirit, all made a poet of this consummate politician. Two other new books address Abraham Lincoln in ways dramatically different ways from Morris’s approach. Historian and novelist Richard Slotkin has written a novel about Lincoln’s upbringing and early years, titled simply Abe. It is an adventurous, violent, and yet thoughtful melodrama based in historical research but not strangled by it.

Usually Slotkin has a light touch that brings the man alive without dressing him up as the myth. This skill shows especially in such scenes as the teenage Abe working on his reading skills, even when he pores over a book that contains the Declaration of Independence. After all, reading really was Lincoln’s salvation, and his first inklings of the power of language and the language of power came from the already sacred American gospels. Slotkin nicely renders the requisite Huck Finn scenes, such as Abe’s momentous journey down the Mississippi. However, there are moments when the author’s admiration for his hero gets out of hand. At one point Slotkin’s teenage Abe is mistaken for a high yaller octoroon and actually quotes Shylock’s Hath not a Jew eyes? speech with references to slaves replacing those to Jews. Jan Morris is skeptical about the mythological Abraham Lincoln, and Richard Slotkin’s narrative urge is inspired by both the myths and the facts. Another new book examines the ways in which Lincoln’s powerful figure captured the imagination of Hollywood and other purveyors of popular culture. Abraham Lincoln: Twentieth-Century Popular Portrayals, by Frank Thompson (Taylor, $26.95, 0878332413), is a curious labor of love. Thompson has thoughtfully examined every movie about Lincoln, including silents, and also the many portrayals on television. After all, the cinematic Lincoln ranges the spectrum from Henry Fonda’s Young Mr. Lincoln to comic appearances in Police Squad and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Through this surprisingly entertaining tour, Thompson evaluates the popular status of Abraham Lincoln. Apparently the myth is alive and well.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

This book’s a carrier.

No, not the Typhoid Mary kind, but the kind you carry around with you from place to place, the kitchen to the bedroom, the car to the dentist’s office, just in case you might have an empty minute somewhere to check out the next event in the lives of the complex and troubled Blau clan.

Thirteen-year-old Stefan Blau triggers the multigenerational saga in 1894 when he runs away from Burgdorf, Germany, and emigrates to the United States, eventually settling in Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire. From a rented rowboat, he sees on shore the image of the Wasserburg, a magnificent apartment house he will build, six stories of pillars, marble fireplaces, beveled mirrors, and wrought-iron sconces. Dancing around the fountains and courtyards, a small girl whirls in his vision. Later he will recognize her as his own granddaughter, sharing his passion for this water fortress which, for better or worse, will dominate the lives of the next century of Blaus.

Ursula Hegi, author of six other books, and herself an immigrant from Germany at age 18, has covered this territory before, most notably in Stones from the River, a contender for the PEN/Faulkner Award and an Oprah book club selection. Picking up characters from the fringes of that novel, she follows them through four generations of relationships with each other and the beautiful, sometimes obsessive, building.

Hegi writes with a German accent. Her work is strong and teleological, driving to an end that is telegraphed from the beginning ( many years later when Robert would . . . ). Because so much ground must be covered, her characters here are sometimes seen from a distance, their actions and thoughts described more than lived on the page. For all that, The Vision of Emma Blau grabs that soap-opera hook in every reader’s brain and hangs on for dear life, serving up a prime collection of mildly and majorly dysfunctional souls.

Metaphorically, it has always been the sin of the fathers that is visited upon the children. Hegi takes the idea into another dimension. In this book, it’s the dream of the father that is visited upon the children. Maude McDaniel reviews for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers.

John Jakes, author of The Kent Family Chronicles and The North and South Trilogy, began a new cycle of historical novels with the best-selling Homeland, “to tell what happened” in America, and the world, during the last one hundred years. Now, for all those readers who followed the stories of Pauli Kroner, Herschel Wolinski, Joe and Ilsa Crown and their children Fritzi, Carl, and Joe Junior and who have since bombarded the novelist with requests to tell what happened next Jakes has completed the long-awaited second novel of the Crown family dynasty. American Dreams is aptly named. Against a panoramic view of American life and culture in transition between 1905-1917, it continues, in vivid detail, the stories of three dreamers previously introduced in Homeland: Fritzi, her younger brother, Carl, and their cousin, Paul. For each one of these protagonists, the American dream is tinged with the same Apollo-like promise a bittersweet blend of happiness and loss. Fritzi achieves the public acclaim she has longed for, but only at the cost of abandoning her dream of a stage career and becoming engulfed in the burgeoning motion picture industry.

Carl, fascinated with machines, pursues a turbulent, out-of-control course that brings him into conflict with Henry Ford in Detroit. He plunges into the maelstrom of the racing circuit with speed king Barney Oldfield and is eventually sent skyward, first as a pilot for a flying circus, then as a mercenary for the Mexican Federalists, and, finally, as a fighter pilot in war-torn Europe.

Paul, the acclaimed author of I Witness History, a book about his experiences as a newsreel filmmaker, loses his job when he defies British law by making public his footage of atrocities committed by the German army. Toward the end of the novel, back in Europe to obtain more war footage, Paul, in a moment of supreme despair, senses that the deaths he is recording are a harbinger of the end of an era that the nightmare of war has “enveloped Europe’s golden summers of peace and confidence, turning them to winters of despair and ruin.” But in the midst of this darkness, the novel like America, and like the giddy century which the world is still experiencing rises above despair. The real American dream, perhaps, is emblemized in the rhapsody of hope spoken by music maestro Harry Poland (once known as the immigrant Herschel Wolinski) about Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty: “She says so much, that great lady. She says, ÔWelcome, whoever you are. You needn’t be rich, or renowned, there is a place for you anyway.’ To me especially, she says, ÔThis is the land where you can realize your wildest dream if you work hard. So go forward, for that’s where the future lies . . . ahead of you. You will never find it by going back.'” Reviewed by Robert C. Jones.

Louis de Bernières is the go-to guy if you like richly told "big" books such as Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds Without Wings—sweeping stories, filled with colorful characters and told from multiple points of view. His new book is not big—in fact, it is little more than a novella—and the multiplicity of voices with which the narrative unwinds has been reduced to just two. Still, A Partisan’s Daughter is vintage de Bernières: a story of impossible love, ethnic conflict and the whims of history, played out through the inevitable fates of ordinary, if compelling characters.

These characters are Chris and Roza. He’s a 40-year-old English pharmaceuticals salesman, locked in a loveless suburban marriage; she’s an undocumented Yugoslav girl, scraping out an existence amid the economic hardship of pre-Thatcher 1970s London. They meet when, on an impulse—and for the first time in his life—Chris approaches a girl he believes to be a streetwalker. Roza protests she is not a "working girl," but she accepts a ride from him because she judges him, rightly, to be safe and kind. Before they part, she admits that she was once a prostitute, and charged 500 pounds for her services. Obsessed with the idea of sleeping with her, Chris begins to squirrel away money, but in the meantime he regularly visits Roza as friend rather than client, enjoying her company and listening to her stories.

They are vibrant, sometimes disturbing stories of her childhood near Belgrade, as well as her misadventures after she escaped to England. Roza shocks Chris with the revelation that she once seduced her father, who was a comrade of Tito, and details her rape at the hands of a British thug. But Chris, like readers of the novel, is never quite sure when Roza is telling the truth or when she is weaving a tale to make herself more fascinating—to this humdrum man who so obviously adores her, and to herself.

De Bernières, like Roza, knows how to construct a captivating narrative, and A Partisan’s Daughter is a graceful, persuasive exploration of boundless storytelling and the limits of love.

Anyone familiar with a collection of short stories entitled Fishing the Sloe-Black River knows the strength of Colum McCann’s writing. Like Thomas Wolfe, McCann writes lyrical prose that is both refined and urbane. Given the structure of the short story, McCann’s talents distill themselves into wonderfully descriptive passages that segue gracefully into and out of the action of his well-captured characters. McCann is a master at making his language float about whatever subject or object he has chosen to describe. In his stories his vocabulary slips easily from the archaic to the profane, proving him to be much more than a literary stuffed shirt. McCann’s strong knowledge of words is only out done by his even stronger sense of the way words sound. Whether expressing dialect or trying to evoke the emotion of a certain exchange, one cannot help but admire the way McCann’s dialogues draw out sounds. The stories of Fishing the Sloe-Back River are a wonderful testament to a writer with an incredible ear for language.

This Side of Brightness follows in this tradition of powerful writing. This new novel captures all of the admirable qualities of his short stories and expands them. The long form of the novel suits McCann well in this generational story about one man’s struggle to raise a family in New York City. The novel begins just after the turn of the century when we meet Nathan Walker, a transplanted Georgian working as a digger in the New York City subway system. Walker is embroiled in the burgeoning Irish community of the Lower East Side as he works in the dangerous and somewhat heroic position as a lead digger in the tunnels being excavated underneath the East River. After a disaster in the tunnels, Walker’s ties to an Irish family are deepened by his eventual courtship and marriage to a deceased friend/coworker’s daughter. From this marriage springs the great tale of the Walker clan as it spans three generations living in Harlem under the stigma of a being a family born from a racially mixed couple.

As a novelist McCann could not be better fit for such a remarkable tale about such a memorable family. His strengths at dialogue are well served not only in his rendering of life in the growing Irish community of New York but also through the thoughts and conversations of a mysterious homeless narrator whose place in the novel takes on an almost prodigal nature. McCann addresses the big issues of race, love, and time with a literary majesty that completely befits the nature and scope of this family epic. His tone as novelist is a wonderful reminder of the self-assured poetics of his shorter fiction, yet now even more of a literary treat as he traces out his tale through the vicissitudes of time. This Side of Brightness is an epic not only in its embrace of one family’s generational struggles, but in its accomplishments as powerfully written art.

n his new novel, Where I’m Bound, Allen Ballard does a masterful job of filling in the most underreported annals of the Civil War, the fighting exploits of the black soldiers of the Union Army.

These soldiers were under more than one gun, since their capture meant almost certain death by hanging or the firing squad. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, told his generals that officers of black regiments were to be “put to death” at the discretion of a military court. The black soldiers were to be returned to their masters, sold, or put to work helping the Confederate troops.

What usually happened was that black troops were hanged or shot when captured. At Fort Pillow, for instance, black soldiers surrendered their arms after being promised that all who did so would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead they were shot “without mercy,” according to eyewitnesses.

Where I’m Bound tells the dramatic story of black cavalry scout Joe Duckett, whose regiment roamed the Mississippi Delta, seeking slaves held by the Confederates and trying to keep vital waterways open for Union gunboats. The pictures of war are dramatic as seen through the eyes of black slaves who tried to escape to freedom and the troops who were fighting for the same freedom. It was not a pretty war for most, and cruelty was not the sole transgression of the Confederate troops. This is the first novel by Ballard, who teaches history and African-American studies at the State University of New York at Albany. He has written two nonfiction books on African-American history. Most of Ballard’s novel is historically correct, although he has fudged a bit for the sake of greater realism here and there.

Where I’m Boundis an absorbing story that will touch the reader in different ways, but it will entertain and educate about a war that is history, if it is, indeed, sad history.

Where I’m Bound should be required reading for true Civil War buffs, but it is well worthwhile for those who simply like a well-told story.

Lloyd Armour is a former newspaper editor.