Book Club / February
Book on Lincoln years is timely and relevant
A diversity of opinion in President Lincoln’s Cabinet played a key role in the success of his administration, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin
This is certainly the moment, in our time, to be reading Lincoln. Two hundred years ago this month, the man who would become America’s 16th president was born in a humble Kentucky cabin.
TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster
916 pages, $21
Meantime, in the here and now, Lincoln study has become downright smart — and a little bit trendy.
On the campaign trail, Barack Obama toted around Lincoln- themed books to dip into in his spare moments. His grass-roots campaign style — and his leadership manner, not to mention the way he has assembled a diverse team of top administration officials — has been likened to the methods of Honest Abe.
Now, that may be stretching it a bit — or at the very least, premature. But one local expert on presidential history says that reading about Lincoln, or any past president, is a great thing to do at this moment in our collective story.
“It’s important to understand how leadership is best executed,” said Dr. James E. Campbell, professor of political science at the University at Buffalo. “You want to understand that — especially in a democracy, where presidential leadership is under scrutiny at every minute.”
But it all gets a bit confusing when it comes to reading matter.
In recent years, and especially this winter, the pile of Lincoln-related material on bookstore shelves has become mountainous: Lincoln’s own letters, speeches and essays, some of which have been reissued this winter in an impressive new edition from Bantam Books; a fresh crop of biographies dealing with Lincoln and Mary Todd, his complicated wife; and scads of illuminating books that shed new light — political, historical, cultural — on the Lincoln Years in the White House.
How to choose, from all this wealth?
Don’t be intimidated. This month, The Buffalo News Book Club — in an effort to be as timely and relevant as possible, when choosing nonfiction works for our annual list — is putting into the hands of Western New York readers a book about Lincoln that is one of the very best to come along in the past half-century.
“Team of Rivals,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin, takes as its subject Lincoln’s presidency: in particular, Lincoln’s creation of his Cabinet.
But this book — a hefty 900 pages, including the index and notes — is much more than that.
It covers Lincoln’s life beginning with the lives of his parents, and traces his political training as a novice in the public sphere in Illinois in detail. The book illuminates the personal side of Lincoln, showing his close friendships with various males he knew professionally, and his union with Mary Todd, as well.
The book takes flight when it takes up the stories of the lives of Lincoln’s complex and challenging Cabinet members — most prominent among them the trio of New York Sen. William H. Seward, Ohio Gov. Salmon P. Chase and Missouri lawmaker Edward Bates — and interweaves these multiple life stories into and around Lincoln’s own history.
Lincoln’s unconventional Cabinet picks may have played into the success of his presidency, which is now viewed as one of the greatest in the nation’s history, experts said.
“Presidents who have been successful want to avoid having yes men beneath them,” said Campbell, the UB professor. “Those who have a lot of people around them who do that [agreeing with them on all matters] are not well-served. It’s important that you have some people — even if they aren’t ‘rivals’ — that have enough guts to tell the president he’s wrong.”
“And the president has got to have the guts to hear it.”
This multifaceted biographical approach allows Goodwin to neatly accomplish what many other biographers struggle to do: show just how unusual a man Abraham Lincoln was, both before and after he won election to the White House in 1860. When you compare his life and his choices with those of other contemporaneous men — well, you really begin to understand the many ways that Lincoln stood apart from the crowd.
“Team of Rivals” has been about as decorated as a Lincoln book can be. It won the Lincoln Prize, the New York Historical Society Book Prize, the Barondess/ Lincoln Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.
As always, we are interested to know what you think of this month’s selection, and your ideas for future choices.
Please e-mail your thoughts to: bookclub@buffnews.com. Or you may send them by mail to: The Buffalo News Book Club, Features Dept., P. O. Box 100, Buffalo, NY 14240.
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