Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma. One of the Wall
Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post
Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best
Book of 2020 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and
the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award "A marvelous cultural
biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness. . .
. using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context
surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's biography so
different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and
compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural-'With malice
toward none; with charity for all'-come from? This big, wonderful
book provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and
everything else, about Lincoln." -Gordon Wood, Wall Street Journal
From one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a
revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in
the making, that brings him to life within his turbulent age David
S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural
biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth
century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham
Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe
is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of
American life in the decades before the Civil War. It was a country
growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a
democratic popular culture that reflected the country's
contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by
Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the
West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England
Puritan stock on his father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on
his mother's, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict
of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was
his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking
formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for
self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy
jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite
for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from
them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance
into politics. No one can transcend the limitations of their time,
and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's
masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed
to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most
enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some
and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while
keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the
Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country.
Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge
Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union,
transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling
discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."
Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped
by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape
them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the
great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh
and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our
American education.
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