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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
