Why am I passionate about this?
As a college freshman, I was profoundly affected by a mesmerizing, Pulitzer-Prize-winning professor and Lincoln scholar, David Herbert Donald, who became an important mentor. I was drawn to Lincoln as source of personal inspiration, someone who triumphed over adversity, one who despite a childhood of emotional malnutrition and grinding poverty, despite a lack of formal education, despite a series of career failures, despite a woe-filled marriage, despite a tendency to depression, despite a painful midlife crisis, despite the early death of his mother and his siblings as well as of his sweetheart and two of his four children, became a model of psychological maturity, moral clarity, and unimpeachable integrity.
Michael's book list on Lincoln as an anti-racist
Why did Michael love this book?
As I read through this “cultural biography,” I was delighted to find that among the many subjects he covers, the distinguished author devoted much attention to the racial climate of antebellum America, for, as he put it, Lincoln’s “attitudes toward race must be measured against those of the surrounding culture. Only then can we responsibly come to a conclusion about this crucial topic.”
That responsible conclusion: Lincoln was “leftist abolitionist who loathed racism” and a “radical anti-racist.” A literary scholar, Reynolds notes that Lincoln “cunningly surrounded” seemingly racist pronouncements “with phrases that pointed in a radically abolitionist direction.”
Moreover, Reynolds rightly insisted that only by examining Lincoln’s “personal interchange with black people” can “we see the complete falsity of the charges of innate racism that some have levelled at him.”
1 author picked Abe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma, airing February 18, 2022.
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…