Brookhiser Richard - Founders son: a life of Abraham Lincoln

Praise for Founders Son

[Brookhisers] melding of Lincoln with the founders yields significant implications for the interpretation of the American pastin both the Revolutionary and Civil War eras.

Drew Gilpin Faust, New York Times Book Review

Beautifully written and choked with insights.... For Brookhiser, Lincolns life was an encounter with a succession of fathers: his own, the Founding Fathers, and God the father. Can it be only a coincidence that in time he himself was regarded as Father Abraham?

Boston Globe

Mr. Brookhiser positions Lincoln as the self-conscious heir of the eighteenth-century Founders and thus fends off the claim (made in the fever swamps of both left and right) that Lincoln subverted the Constitution in the interests of creating an all-powerful central government.

Allen Guelzo, Wall Street Journal, Gift Books: Civil War

Brookhiser has done the seemingly impossible: He has written a life of Lincoln that is fresh, original, and ideal for those new to the subject.... While others have explored the influence of the Founders on Lincolns thought and statesmanship... Brookhiser has distilled his own profound insights, gained from writing eight fine books on the Founders, into a masterpiece of brevity and crystalline prose. He is a moral biographer of great eruditiona Parson Weems with his facts straightand has given us a study of Lincoln that can be swiftly read but should be slowly savored.... With deft, epigrammatic phrases, Brookhiser distills Lincolns life to its essence.

National Review

Since he is well-chronicled, and often mythologized, it is hard to expand our understanding of Lincoln. But Richard Brookhiser does an expert job of finding new room.

Weekly Standard

Founders Son is not just another Lincoln biography (more than 15,000 have already been published). Instead, it is a chronicle of Lincolns mental and spiritual evolution, much of it written in his own words; indeed, Abraham Lincoln has almost all the best lines.

Washington Times

A well-written and readable interpretation of Lincolns political philosophy.

Choice

[An] illuminating but unconventional new biography of Abraham Lincoln.... [Brookhiser] succeeds brilliantly in giving us a new and original perspective on Lincolns statesmanship. His prose is spare and robust (the author has been schooled by Lincoln) and even readers who know little of Lincoln will find the treatment entirely readable, enjoyable, and persuasive.

New Criterion

As he has before... he clearly demonstratesin decided contrast to so many of his comrades on the rightthat he takes history seriously. And here, providing us with a close historical reading of Lincolns speeches, notes, and correspondence, he enables us to not only better understand, but also (and even more effectively than he did in his previous biographical studies) to actually feel his subjects battles both with his antagonists and with history itself.

Harvey Kaye, Daily Beast

Drawing on Lincolns official papers, speeches, and private letters, the book makes clear how he looked back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutions Preamble to resolve the great contradiction that the Founders couldntslaverys existence in a nation where all are created equal and have unalienable rights.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

An unconventional new biography of Lincoln.... Brookhiser quotes many of Lincolns speeches and letters to demonstrate how he was influenced by the Founders in his struggle with the great issues of his time, slavery, and civil war.

Seattle Times

A compact, profound, and utterly absorbing new life of Abraham Lincoln.... With searchlight intensity, it dazzlingly illuminates the great presidents 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.

City Journal

Irresistible pacing, exciting, and accessible, [Founders Son] is a unique and essential insight into this pivotal figure from American history.

San Francisco Book Review

A pithy biography of the man who not only ended slavery in America, but also distilled the Founders legacy. Astonishingly, Brookhiser has added to the massive Lincoln literature a book that is both distinct and important.

Commentary

Working mainly from Lincolns speeches, Brookhiser carefully examines the full range, from his early talks as Lincoln began his career to the famous ones of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and those of his presidency.... There is much to admire in Founders Son.

American Scholar

Brookhiser excels in describing Lincolns political fights over government banks and in parsing his presidency in wartimespecifically, his detailed account of the complex evolution of the presidents views on slavery.

Publishers Weekly

Lincoln knew that history was both past and prologue, and he sought to appropriate the earlier age properly to guide the nation successfully through the Civil War. This highly accessible read will appeal most to readers who desire to learn more about Lincoln and especially the ideas, dogmas, and dreams that moved him to his public career and life in the White House.

Library Journal

[Brookhisers] discussion of the second inaugural is genuinely moving and instructive. The narrative always smoothly returns, though, to the Founders and Lincolns unceasing attempt to divine their intentions and to examine the institutions they built and the opportunity they created for someone like him to thrive. For years now, Brookhiser has helped bring the Founders back to life, precisely Lincolns purpose as the president contemplated for his country a new birth of freedom, the old freedom they envisioned in 1776 but couldnt quite perfect.

Kirkus Reviews

Lincoln was not a conventional politician, and neither is Richard Brookhiser a conventional historian, nor, fittingly, is Founders Son a conventional biography. For the sixteenth president, as Brookhiser dazzlingly argues, ideas matteredbut never so much as when translated into action. Throughout Lincolns life, the Founders served as his touchstones, their ideals his lodestars, and he dedicated himself to completing the task they had left unfinished; the destruction of slavery, that Damoclean Sword menacing the Republic since its creation, would be both his monument and his tomb. Founders Son is an ingenious intellectual biography, a work of the highest order written by one of our most creative historians about the most brilliant of our presidents.

Alexander Rose, author of Washingtons Spies: The Story of Americas First Spy Ring

In his first inaugural, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the mystic chords of memory that bound those about to fight a civil war over the meaning of union and liberty to those who had built a system of government on them during and after the Revolution. Distinguished historian Richard Brookhiser strikes those chords in Founders Son. In doing so, he reveals Lincoln to be not only a student of the past, but a leader with the mind and courage to redeem Americas first birth of freedom with a new one, sealed in blood.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

Abraham Lincoln is the most written-about man in American history, yet Richard Brookhiser, a historian and writer of extraordinary talent, has written an analysis that is lively, incisive, noveland brilliant. This book reminds us of Lincolns reverence for the Founders, his stubborn concern for first principles andultimatelythe often-overlooked reverence for the Almighty God that guided him in Americas darkest hours.