Abe
Abraham Lincoln in His Times
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- ¥1,300
発行者による作品情報
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Reynolds (Mightier Than the Sword) unpacks the diverse cultural influences that shaped the intellect, morals, and politics of Abraham Lincoln in this magisterial and authoritative biography. Reynolds's wide-angled view includes frontier social events, such as logrolls and cabin raisings, that marked Lincoln's early years; cultural moments including French acrobat Charles Blondin's tightrope walks over Niagara Falls in 1859, which Lincoln saw as a potent metaphor for his handling of the slavery issue; and humorist David Ross Locke's "wholesale assault on racial prejudice" through the persona of "the quintessential Copperhead," Petroleum V. Nasby. Reynolds also profiles drillmaster Elmer Ellsworth and pamphleteer Anna Ella Carroll, both of whom played outsized, if little remembered, roles in shaping Lincoln's approach to the Civil War. Close readings of Lincoln's own writings bring insights into his character and thinking, and Reynolds's analysis of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address offer a deeper understanding of those near-sacred political texts, noting, for instance, allusions to the Bible and Euclidean geometry in the Gettysburg speech. With a knack for drawing unexpected but persuasive conclusions, and impressive command of his source material, Reynolds provides a portrait rich in texture and context, not only of Lincoln but of the America he inhabited and helped redefine. The result is a must-read addition to the canon of Lincoln biographies.