NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon
Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting how--and
why--he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of
slavery to expand the possibilities of America.
"In his captivating new book, Jon Meacham has given us the Lincoln for
our time."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BIOGRAPHERS INTERNATIONAL PLUTARCH AWARD - ONE OF
THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus
Reviews
A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a
twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated
and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle
of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a
clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him
we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its
limitations.
At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest
of American presidents--a remote icon--or as a politician driven more by
calculation than by conviction. This illuminating new portrait gives us
a very human Lincoln--an imperfect man whose moral antislavery
commitment, essential to the story of justice in America, began as he
grew up in an antislavery Baptist community; who insisted that slavery
was a moral evil; and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave
him to see the right.
This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky
frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic
assassination in 1865: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his
bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and
his persistent conviction that slavery must end. In a nation shaped by
the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black
Americans, Lincoln's story illustrates the ways and means of politics in
a democracy, the roots and durability of racism, and the capacity of
conscience to shape events.
