LINCOLN'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

Name: LINCOLN'S POLITICAL THOUGHT
Author: George Kateb
ISBN: 978-0674368163

by George Kateb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 15, 2014

An erudite work that gently unravels the great man’s distortions and political expediency. Though it may prove recondite for...

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A sincere attempt to make peace with Abraham Lincoln’s written political thought leads the distinguished Princeton academic into reflective, occasionally troubled waters.

Kateb (Human Dignity, 2011, etc.) feels his way through Lincoln’s speeches and letters, probing the process, gradual and often opaque, of his grasping of the necessity as president of emancipating the slaves in order to reassert the worth and dignity of the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident first assumption. In unearthing Lincoln’s “political religion,” which evolved over roughly 10 years, from passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 to his assassination in 1865, Kateb looks first at what Lincoln was up against, namely unprecedented “group ferocities” that counted not just the intractable Southern states bent on secession (the slave states did not even make a show of backing Lincoln’s Democratic rival, Stephen Douglas), but also the outraged abolitionists sworn to vengeance on the South. The author also examines the “passion of patriotism” each side claimed for its own. By the time of his “House Divided” speech in 1858, Lincoln declared that the nation “would become all slave or all free”—there was no more room for compromise. Which was the truth; i.e., which side did God endorse? Lincoln, the politician and man of his age, was not rallying for the abolitionists, and while he detested slavery, he did not endorse emancipation until much later, believing that blacks weren’t ready—or rather, whites weren’t. Kateb traces these telling moments in Lincoln’s words, where he “was hiding the truth or hiding from it.” What Lincoln did embrace above all was human equality and the sanctity of the preservation of the Union; for these to endure, slavery had to be destroyed.

An erudite work that gently unravels the great man’s distortions and political expediency. Though it may prove recondite for a general audience, the book is compelling throughout.

Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2014

ISBN: 978-0674368163

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014

Categories:

HISTORY | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

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THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955

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This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.