This Week's Suggested Book from the Ashbrook Center (Sunday, January 12, 2003)
 | | Abraham Lincoln: A Penguin Lives Biography
by Thomas Keneally |
Viking Press 192 pages, January 2003 Hardcover, 19.95 ISBN: 0670031755
A percentage of the proceeds from your purchase of this book from Amazon.com will benefit the Ashbrook Center.
This self-made man from a log cabin-the great orator, the Emancipator, the savior of the Union, the martyr-was arguably our greatest president; but it takes a master storyteller like Thomas Keneally, author of the award-winning novel that inspired the film Schindler's List, to bring alive the history behind the myth. Acclaimed for his recent Civil War biography, American Scoundrel, Keneally delves with relishand a keen, fresh eyeinto Lincoln's complicated persona.
Abraham Lincoln depicts all the amazing man's triumphs, insecurities, and crushing defeats with uncanny insight: his early poverty and the ambition that propelled him out of it; the shaping of the man and his political philosophy by youthful exposure to Christianity, slavery, and business; his tempestuous marriage and his fatherly love. We see him, elected to the presidency by a twist of fate, unswerving in the grim day-to-day conduct of the war as his vision and acumen led the country forward. Abraham Lincoln is an incisive study of a turning point in our history and a revealing portrait of its pivotal figure, his greatness etched even more clearly in this very touching human story.
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