A creative thesis thoroughly explored and beautifully argued.
A member of the board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and the Lincoln Studies Group examines the moral reasoning at the heart of the president’s statecraft.
Lincoln’s graceful and humane exercise of power remains exemplary, a startling assessment, perhaps, of the man who presided over the greatest slaughter in American history. But Lincoln was neither a prophet nor a saint, neither a reformer nor a revolutionary. Rather, he was an engaged, embattled politician who clearly understood the role of settled law and of government and who resisted the temptation to engage in moral posturing. Miller (Ethics and Institutions/Univ. of Virginia; Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, 2002, etc.) focuses on Lincoln’s moral reasoning, demonstrating how worthy statecraft requires the leader to attend to reality, to the objective situation, to achieve his goals, all the while hewing to certain principles that cannot be compromised. From the time he took the oath of office, the bedrock principle for Lincoln was the preservation of the Union, no mere political power struggle in his mind, but rather an undertaking with vast, universal moral significance: whether a free, constitutional government could sustain itself, whether a successful appeal from ballots to bullets would mean not just diminishing or damaging the American experiment, but rather destroying it. Through this lens, Miller examines Lincoln’s leadership under the unique circumstances of civil war in a variety of cases large and small: the decision to resupply Fort Sumter, to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to enroll freed slaves in the Union army; the exercise of the president’s pardon power; the strategies to keep border states from joining the rebellion and to keep foreign powers at bay. While enduring the criticism of opponents, the incompetence or, in George McClellan’s case, insubordination of his generals, or horrible battlefield reversals, Lincoln remained a resolute and aggressive war leader, even as he displayed an uncommon charity and largeness of spirit. His remarkable success, Miller makes clear, was attributable not only to his powerful mind, but also to his moral clarity, a seemingly unerring instinct that allowed him to achieve his goals without losing his own or his country’s soul.
A creative thesis thoroughly explored and beautifully argued.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4103-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
