Addressing the success of McCullough's approach to American history, the Globe's reviewer, Brandeis University historian David Hackett Fischer -- whose account of that year-end victory, ''Washington's Crossing," was last year's Pulitzer Prize winner -- asked, ''How does he do it?"
Simply put, Fischer wrote, there is a McCullough ''touch" -- ''fluent and engaging," a ''different texture" from the work of academic historians. The academics' research seeks ''to solve a conceptual problem," Fischer wrote, while McCullough's is ''a hunt for visual materials and dramatic possibilities." And while that sometimes finds McCullough bypassing the ''complexity of large events," Fischer wrote, his ''vivid but carefully controlled descriptions of scenes, characters, and events become a way of explaining what happened."
Goodwin enters the field of Lincoln studies with ''Team of Rivals" (Simon & Schuster, $35), an account of how our 16th president brought his rivals for the 1860 presidential nomination together in his administration. It was ''an unprecedented decision," Goodwin wrote, ''a first indication of what would prove to others a most unexpected greatness."
The Globe's reviewer, Tulane University historian Douglas Brinkley, judged ''Team of Rivals" to be ''a brilliantly conceived and well-written tour de force of a historical narrative." And, in that ''crowded publishing field" of Lincolniana, ''refreshingly unique." Beyond the portrait of Lincoln as ''a cunning pragmatist" that emerges in Goodwin's account, Brinkley found an intriguing '' 'coming-of-age' saga," noting that the members of the team were part of what Goodwin called a restless generation, born when the Founding Fathers were in the White House and a continent was waiting to be explored.
Henry Adams, an important literary figure from several generations ago, chronicled the administrations of Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Somewhat neglected in recent years, Adams's histories have been refurbished by Wills in ''Henry Adams and the Making of America" (Houghton Mifflin, $30) as ''prose masterpieces with brio."
