{"product_id":"abe-abraham-lincoln-in-his-times-9781594206047","title":"Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAbe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times\u003c\/strong\u003e by Reynolds, David S.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781594206047.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincolns Dilemma, airing February 18, 2022.\n\nOne of the Wall Street Journals Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020\n\nWinner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award\n\n\"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. Reynoldss biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and compassion expressed in [Lincolns] 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\n\nFrom 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\n\nDavid 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.\n\nIt was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the countrys contradictions. Lincolns 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 fathers side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mothers, 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.\n\nNo one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynoldss 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.\"\n\nAbraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his lifes 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45119184207925,"sku":"ByrdShop_159420604X","price":28.4,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781594206047_87823014-86a5-4e7e-a06c-f87a2e92d364.jpg?v=1778642335","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/abe-abraham-lincoln-in-his-times-9781594206047","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}