I’m glad to hear you found my methodology useful. 🙂

Goodwin has had her own problems. She was accused of plagiarism and ended up having to settle the matter. It really hurts her credibility.

As for the formatting of the notes, I absolutely HATE that format. I despise it because it’s not user friendly at all. I’m not entirely sure that it’s all Goodwin’s fault; those things are usually chosen by the publisher. My guess is that that’s what happened here.

I bought a copy of the book because I thought that there might be some useful information in it that would shed some light on my biography of Ulric Dahlgren. I would not have bought it otherwise, and I doubt that I will sit down and read the book.

I hope she doesn’t win another Pulitzer.

Eric

Found myself in a Target today with a few minutes to kill, so I wandered over to the book section and noticed that they had the new Doris Kearns Goodwin bio of Lincoln on sale. I picked it up and, thinking of this rant, decided to give it the “Wittenberg Test.”
🙂 Lo and behold, the first thing I noticed was that there is NO bibliography. Second, the notes were formatted in a manner I was unfamiliar with: There are no identifying note numbers within the text, so if the reader wants to see if a particular sentence or paragraph is sourced, they must find the identifying page number within the notes section. Then the individual notes are identified by the beginning and ending words of the sentence or paragraph, which causes the reader to have to remember the opening and closing words of what they just read. Personally, as a reader, I much prefer footnotes to endnotes but apparently that is a far more tedious (expensive) process for publishers than endnotes.

For a book that is touted as a major scholarly work by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, it seemed odd that there is no bibliography and that the endnotes are presented in what I would consider a cumbersome fashion. Am I missing something here?

Paul