| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.4

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

The Lincoln Memorial and American Life

By Christopher A. Thomas

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxii, 213. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

One of the great icons dominating the nation's capital, the Lincoln Memorial assumes an aura of timelessness and inevitability. Yet as Christopher Thomas asserts in his multilayered study, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life, nothing could be further from the truth. Reversing the process suggested on the cover—which shows the famous Daniel Chester French statue of Lincoln in process of completion, with an arm and the head still to be joined to the body—Thomas deconstructs this seemingly impenetrable monument. In the process, he reveals both the physical and the ideological underpinnings of the final product. If such an approach reveals imperfections in a hallowed structure, Thomas argues, it can nonetheless prove "liberating and socially healing" (p. xxii).

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