Books: Lincoln's Wife

MARY LINCOLN—Carl Sandburg & Paul M. Angle—Ear court, Brace ($3). In Chicago's big pan. 15 years ago. one of the brightest literary flashes was Poet Carl Sandburg. His precepts (such as his famed definition of poetry as "the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits") were taken as seriously as his examples. A later day will probably rate his biological work on the Lincolns as his most considerable performance. In Mary Lincoln's 159 pages he telescopes the life of Lincoln's termagant wife as a little companion book to his 604 pages on her...