Tag: Founders’ Son

10/18/14

The Last Founding Father

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Books and Culture
MYRON MAGNET
The Last Founding Father
Richard Brookhiser’s new biography of Lincoln is splendid.
17 October 2014

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, RARE BOOK AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIVISION, ALFRED WHITAL STERN COLLECTION OF LINCOLNIANA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, RARE BOOK AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIVISION, ALFRED WHITAL STERN COLLECTION OF LINCOLNIANA

Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Richard Brookhiser (Basic Books, 376 pp., $27.99)

Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject’s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser’s compact, profound, and utterly absorbing new life of Abraham Lincoln, Founders’ Son, leaps straight to the heart of the matter. With searchlight intensity, it dazzlingly illuminates the great president’s evolving views of slavery and the extraordinary speeches in which he unfolded that vision, molding the American mind on the central conflict in American history and resolving, at heroic and tragic cost to the nation and himself, the contradiction that the Founding Fathers themselves could not resolve. Continue reading →