Customer Reviews

Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas

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A wonderful series of essays on important topics. Well written and researched, a pleasure to read. Guelzo again delivers an outstanding volumn. Bravo!

In this year of scores of new books on Abraham Lincoln, I think others are of better value and more informative for the common reader. (The first book of this year's crop I would recommend is a biography, "A. Lincoln" by White. If one is really interested in the Emancipation, then buy Professor Guelzo's excellent "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation", 2004.)

Professor Guelzo is an expert on this great man and some of these essays are very good (such as the ones on the war powers of a president and on the Emancipation Proclamation) but there are others that really are for a more specialized readership (such as the ones on prudence and the doctrine of necessity.)

As an example from one essay on community-men: "But the jeremiads of Etzione, Bellah, and other 'new communitarians' were not actually all that new. The nineteenth-century founders of scientific sociology--August Comte, Max Weber, Emil Durkeim, and especially Ferdinand Tonnies--all contrasted the new industrial nation-states of the late 1800s with their medieval and traditional predecessors, and usually to the disadvantage of the former." And this feeds directly into a short discussion of the German terms "Gemeinschaft" and "Gesellschaft."


While this is not a bad book by any measure, I just have trouble recommending a collection of previously issued essays, in a book priced at about the same level as a new general biography or other original work. Especially in a publishing year flooded with material on Mr. Lincoln.