My Best Friend, Abe Lincoln: A Tale of Two Boys from Indiana by Robert L. Bloch.






A fun introduction to American history for young children

Published June 2011 by Big Tent Books
Illustrations by John W. Ewing
32 pages


My Best Friend, Abe Lincoln is a children's book (ages 5-8) that creates a fictional account of the adventures of Abraham Lincoln and his best friend as a child in southern Indiana. The best friend, Sam Harding, is entirely made up (as the book makes clear) but the story is based on known details of Lincoln's childhood (for example, Lincoln called the school of his sparse formal education a "blab" school and this book does too) and includes details that would have been common to almost all children of the frontier.

The illustrations should be very approachable to all children since the illustrator, John Ewing, is a former Disney illustrator and he uses a familiar Disney-esque style with his characters. I thought his interpretation of young Lincoln's face was interesting - I had never considered how Lincoln's distinctive, weathered face would have looked as a young man.

The book touches on young Lincoln's love of books, story-telling and introduces the idea of slavery and why he was against it. Young Sam Harding moves to Ohio after his Indiana family farm failed and the young friends say goodbye. The last few pages talk about Sam hearing about Abe Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglass debates and very briefly covers the Civil War.

Several pages that have no specific illustrations have an interesting background: the text of the Gettysburg Address. I recommend this for kids that have interest in history. Also, this would be a great addition to any classroom library or school library.
I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

 This book can be found on Amazon.com here: My Best Friend, Abe Lincoln.
Reviewed on January 4, 2012.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

REVENGE of the TIPPING POINT: OVERSTORIES, SUPERSPREADERS, and the RISE of SOCIAL ENGINEERING (audiobook) by Malcom Gladwell

Image
Published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Malcolm Gladwell delivers another immensely entertaining and informative rambling discussion of, well, so many things in Revenge of the Tipping Point . Ostensibly, this is a look at the opioid epidemic, but Malcolm Gladwell's style always reminds the reader that the world is inter-related and complicated and so very interesting. I plowed through this 8 hour audiobook in just a couple of days. I listened whenever I could and, honestly, I forgot that this was supposed to be a book about the opioid crisis during the 2nd hour and I did not remember he directly came back to the topic during hte 7th hour. In the meantime we had discussed medicare fraud in Florida, Cheetahs in zoos, the dangers of monocultures, Los Angeles as the country's epicenter of bank robberies, COVID superspreaders, vehicle emmissions, and more. It was all so interesting and he does ...
Read more

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

Image
  Highly Recommended Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio. Read by Gabriel Vaughan. Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Flag of the German American Bund In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation). There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America  (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin  was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was ...
Read more

Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Book One) by Jon Land

Image
Loud and strong, this book goes at it hard Published by Forge Books in 2009. William Shatner once commented that the results of his directorial efforts in Star Trek V were "loud". One could easily say the same thing about Jon Land's Strong Enough to Die . Strong Enough To Die comes at you with a gunfight on the first page, has lots of gunfights throughout and ends up with guns and explosions as well. Does it work? Well, yeah. This is not fine literature, mind you. It is loud, lock and load, over-the-top Texas Ranger action. There's some attempts at trying to tie in Bush administration anti-terrorist policies and discussions about living with the aftermath of violence but those get overwhelmed by the gunfire. But, that's okay because too much thinking about the internal incongruities of the text on these matters just spoils the fun. It's the famed Texas Rangers and a bad guy who might be a good guy against the Mexican Mafia and an evil Ame...
Read more

THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM (audiobook) by Tim Alberta

Image
Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023. Read by the author, Tim Alberta. Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in.  Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived. Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme ( The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism ) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn...
Read more

THE DIRECTOR SHOULD'VE SHOT YOU: MEMOIRS of the FILM TRADE (audiobook) by Alan Dean Foster

Image
Published in 2024 by Tantor Media. Read by Stephen R. Thorne. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Alan Dean Foster is a prolific sci-fi author. He has written over 50 sc-fi novels, but he is probably most famous for his numerous novelizations of sci-fi movies and TV shows, such as the original Star Wars movie (ghost written for George Lucas), Alien , Star Trek: The Animated Series , Krull , and The Last Starfighter . The Director Should've Shot You is the story of Foster's experiences as the man who Hollywood turns to to write novelizations of sci-fi movies. He talks about how that system (usually) works, the odd experiences, his interactions with directors, producers, and faceless stuidio executives, and his various thoughts of the strengths and weaknesses of the various projects.  My experiences with Foster as a young reader start with his two Star Wars books that he wrote when George Lucas  and his team were finishing the original movie. As I noted, he ghost wrote th...
Read more

JUST MERCY: A STORY of JUSTICE and REDEMPTION (audiobook) by Bryan Stevenson

Image
Published in 2014 by Random House Audio Read by the author, Bryan Stevenson. Duration: 11 hours, 11 minutes Unabridged. "...if he just had the money for a decent lawyer." Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who has spent his entire career working with people who have been wrongfully convicted and unfairly sentenced. He works through the Equal Justice Initiative with a lot of death row inmates in Alabama. He has succeeded in getting over 100 re-trials and/or re-sentencing hearings for people on death row. He has had multiple convictions completely overturned. Stevenson does a lot of work in Alabama because Alabama doesn't do much to subsidize the defense in death row cases. How much does the state spend for the entire case, including appeals? Just $1,000. Some counties help with that amount, but more than 70% of Alabama's death row inmates were represented by $1,000 lawyers. Considering that the average cost of a simple will is $375 , you can see that a $1,000 worth o...
Read more

THE REST I WILL KILL: WILLIAM TILLMAN and the UNFORGETTABLE STORY of HOW a FREE BLACK MAN REFUSED to BECOME a SLAVE (audiobook) by Brian McGinty

Image
  Published by HighBridge in 2016. Read by Sean Crisden. Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederacy authorized ships to be privateers. Privateers are basically pirates with the explicit backing of a government. The idea was to authorize as many ships as possible to attack Union shipping as part of the Confederate war effort.  William Tillman (c. 1834-?) One of the early victims of these attacks was the S.J. Waring , a ship out of New York City bound for South America. On July 4, 1861 the ship was attacked, captured, and most of the crew was taken off the Waring to the privateer ship but they did leave a few people behind, including the ship's cook - a free black man named William Tillman.  The privateers made it very clear that they were going to sell Tillman in the slave market in Charleston and Tillman was not going to let that happen... Unfortunately, there just isn't a lot of information about William Tillman - eithe...
Read more

SERGEANT STUBBY: HOW a STRAY DOG and HIS BEST FRIEND HELP WIN WORLD WAR I and STOLE the HEART of a NATION (audiobook) by Ann Bausum

Image
Published in 2014 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Pam Ward. Duration: 5 hours, 12 minutes. Unabridged. Sgt. Stubby wearing his medal vest (left), marching in a parade (upper right) and wearing his special gas mask (lower right). During the quick basic training for American forces heading for France in World War I, a stray dog found its way into a Connecticut National Guard training camp at Yale University. The unit was sprawled all over the campus and this Boston Terrier mix wandered around making friends all over. His friendly nature guaranteed a lot of table scraps. He marched with the men, learned the commands and blended in as well as a dog can. Somewhere along the way, someone taught him how to salute and hold the salute until it was returned. When it came time to board a ship and head to France, the soldier that he spent the most time with, Corporal James Robert Conroy, hid him under his coat as others provided a distraction. Once aboard, Stubby ensured he got to stay with his...
Read more

Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West by Anthony Pagden

Image
Disappointed Published in 2008. Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West was a book I was really looking forward to reading. It sat on my wish list for months and when I saw it just sitting there at my local library I greedily snatched it up and considered myself lucky to even have found it checked in. Thank goodness I did not waste my money buying it. I suppose the problem with a book of this nature is that it is bound to disappoint - some things will be "too" highlighted, some left out. Even worse for this book, niggling factual errors crop up that bother the careful reader and throw into doubt the validity of the more complicated interpretations of the work as a whole. Positives: The book is quite readable and you must give a tip of the hat to anyone who undertakes such a large and sweeping history. Negatives: The anti-religious comments taint large sections of the book: "...nor have I made any atte...
Read more

The Secret Scroll by Ronald Cutler

Image
Not good, not bad Published in 2008 by Beaufort Books. Some have reviewed The Secret Scroll very harshly. I am unwilling to do this, despite my opinion that this is not really a good book. I give it 3 Stars. As I told someone else, it is neither drek nor a Pulitzer Prize winner. It's kinda like watching an episode of Matlock - it beats watching nothing but it sure isn't To Kill A Mockingbird , despite being set in the south and having courtroom drama. Positives: -The plot moves along at a quick pace. -Lots of action. -The bad guys are truly bad. -a love story. -I was interested in seeing where Cutler was going with his depictions of Jesus and Paul. -The short (2-5 pages) chapter style makes it an easy book to put down and pick up again. Negatives: -It is set around a scroll that is discovered by an American archaeologist that is supposedly written by Jesus of Nazareth. Cutler makes the text of such a scroll accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with ancie...
Read more