Still enjoying Kaplan's life of Walt Whitman, about five pages with a cup of coffee before limping back to the office from lunch and then about five more pages in bed at night before the clock strikes 10. Keeps me off the streets.
Whitman is just one of the attractions. The window on 19th-century America--Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892--functions as a corrective for the common tendency to idealize the past. Here is Kaplan on the practice of medicine during the Civil War:
The wounded sometimes lay for days where they fell before being loaded like cordwood in supply wagons and hauled over rough roads to primary stations. A few years before Lister proved the value of antiseptic surgery, doctors in blood-stained coats cut and sawed with dirty instruments, moistened sutures with saliva, plied the needle with infected fingers, and washed their hands only when they became smelly or sticky; "surgical fevers"--osteomyelitis, erysipelas, gangrene, and pyemia--were rampant. Survivors of field surgery were packed into dilapidated buildings, where, if not altogether neglected, they were cared for by other soldiers--convalescents, invalids, prisoners, undesirables, and "the ineffective under arms"--who had been pressed into a disagreeable service and were either too resentful not to do harm or too feeble to do good.
"The real war," wrote Whitman in Specimen Days, "will never get in the books." But it's in Kaplan's. Another corrective passage is tossed off lightly in the following footnote, a quotation from Stephen B. Oates, "Lincoln's most acute and evenhanded modern biographer":
The truth was that Lincoln felt embarrassed about his log-cabin origins and never liked to talk about them. . . . he had worked all his adult life to overcome the limitations of his frontier background, to make himself into a literate and professional man who commanded the respect of his colleagues. So if he ever discussed his childhood or his parents, said William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, "it was with great reluctance and significant reserve. There was something about his origin he never cared to dwell on."
In other words: not a rail-splitter, a lawyer.
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