HONEST ABE

From an ``internationally known folk artist,'' a series of carefully composed images representing the most significant and/or best-known points in Lincoln's life. Zeldis's designs are decorative and lively, her colors vibrant—emerald, electric blue, lemon, gold, crimson, fuchsia. But the stiff forms and dour, stolidly stylized figures— recalling traditional naive art—are distancing. Kunhardt presents the essential facts in a brief, unadorned text with sentences so short and simple that they fall like the blows of a hammer. An acceptable first biography, and interesting for the art, where funds permit. (Biography/Picture book. 5-8)