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Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
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List Price: $27.95
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Manufacturer: Harper
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.7092
EAN: 9780060773342
ISBN: 0060773340
Label: Harper
Manufacturer: Harper
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: 2008-11-01
Publisher: Harper
Release Date: 2008-10-28
Studio: Harper
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Editorial Reviews:
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For Abraham Lincoln, whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered. In Lincoln, acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan explores the life of America's sixteenth president through his use of language as a vehicle both to express complex ideas and feelings and as an instrument of persuasion and empowerment. Like the other great canonical writers of American literature—a status he is gradually attaining—Lincoln had a literary career that is inseparable from his life story. An admirer and avid reader of Burns, Byron, Shakespeare, and the Old Testament, Lincoln was the most literary of our presidents. His views on love, liberty, and human nature were shaped by his reading and knowledge of literature. Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and addressed his audience with equal and enduring effectiveness. Kaplan focuses on the elements that shaped Lincoln's mental and imaginative world; how his writings molded his identity, relationships, and career; and how they simultaneously generated both the distinctive political figure he became and the public discourse of the nation. This unique account of Lincoln's life and career highlights the shortcomings of the modern presidency, reminding us, through Lincoln's legacy and appreciation for language, that the careful and honest use of words is a necessity for successful democracy. Illuminating and engrossing, Lincoln brilliantly chronicles Abraham Lincoln's genius with language.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Alluring title, fair insight, but somehow flat
Comment: Perhaps I was unable to overcome page five. That's where the author says Lincoln was born on February 9th. From there on, skpeticism was never very far away.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Kaplan's Lincoln
Comment: I found this book by Professor Kaplan to be interesting at times, but as a whole, unsatisfactory. Information provided on the young Lincoln's early reading and writing is good. However, the author finds it necessary to go into some detail about aspects of Mr. Lincoln's life that have little to do with his writing (for example, Mary Lincoln's temperament and a later episode involving an Indian uprising in Minnesota), while devoting relatively limited attention to the several great speeches of Abraham Lincoln's presidency.
Absent is any discussion of President Lincoln's writing in terms of his military orders or other such important communications to his generals in the field.
I also disagree with Professor Kaplan's economic and political views on why the South fought as described on pages 328-329. In my opinion, this was a war commenced by Southern plantation-owners to preserve and expand slavery. Other offered reasons pale in comparison.
Professor Kaplan drifts easily into an academic style, such as this sentence on page 317: "Words mattered so much, if you will, whether the occasion of expression was public or personal, that his autobiographical sketch inevitably became an exemplification of the existential self, its style and focus part of a self-definition that even a self-serving situation could not entirely undermine."
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of two presidents who liked to read
Comment: Another book about Lincoln?
Yes! And a great book. From his love letters to the Gettysburg and second inaugural addresses, Lincoln was a master of putting great ideas into succinct words. In contrast to recent presidents, who are "too busy" to read much of anything, Lincoln and John Quincy Adams are the only presidents for whom literature and life were inseparable.
During his presidency, his two favourite volumes were Shakespeare's plays and the Bible -- both written in the same era -- in which he found an echo of the tragedy of the American Civil War. Most significantly, he did not often read to relax. Lincoln read to educate himself, to improve his mind and to understand the motives and methods of himself and others.
Think of the current financial crisis in which "deregulation" became liberty for bankers and a disaster for consumers. Lincoln understood such issues in terms of stories, such as "the shepherd who drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a Black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty."
"The claim that white Liberty requires Black servitude is a definition of liberty, in Lincoln's telling phrase, from 'the wolf's dictionary', and that dictionary must be repudiated," Kaplan wrote. Think of the impact today had former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan read and understood as much as deeply as Lincoln.
From his earliest days Lincoln used stories to illustrate his views. This explains the origins of the quality of his writing, both in terms of style and content. It's much more than just "another book about Lincoln", this is primarily a book about the growth of a great writer.
It's similar to 'Lives of the Artists' by Calvin Tomkins; the bottom line is the dedication to a single theme that produces greatness. As a child he was brought up on 'Dilworth's Speller'; in his early adult years he read Byron, then Weems, Burns and Goethe. None were passing fancies; each was a dedication to a particular author before he moved on to a more serious topic. His "reading" for the law took 10 years.
This book helps explain why men such as Lincoln are very rare.
Interestingly, instead of relying on the will of God, friends such as John Todd Stuart said Lincoln was "an avowed and open Infidel -- Sometimes bordered on atheism ... always denied that Jesus was the son of God as understood and maintained by the Christian world." Instead of an instant acceptance of Jesus as his saviour, Lincoln's reading was on the great authors to understand the ways of mankind.
He didn't reject the Bible, but he didn't "court" evangelicals and other true believers. Instead of instant salvation, he rejected fanatics. Lincoln was always eager to read, to learn and to write better. He never thought himself as blessed with complete wisdom which closed his mind to any and all new ideas.
Breathes there such a man today ?
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