PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewComing so soon after a neoconfederate mob rampaged through the Capitol, a respectful biography of the ideological father of the Confederacy may feel as welcome as an exhumed corpse. But the young historian Robert Elder has given us just that in Calhoun — an illuminating account of the life of the notorious white supremacist as well as his complex afterlife in American political culture ... In his lucid book about this complex and contradictory figure, Robert Elder wisely refrains from assigning Calhoun to a stationary spot along the political spectrum. He points out that echoes of Calhoun’s ideas have not come exclusively from the right ... Elder finished writing this valuable book too soon to add that with Donald Trump’s brazen effort to overturn election results where Black voters — so long disenfranchised by heirs of Calhoun — helped determine the outcome, the cause of states’ rights suddenly became the cause of the left.
Harold Holzer
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s always tricky to lift a historical figure out of the past and drop him into the present. Holzer and Garfinkle don’t do this explicitly, as might be done in a fantasy novel, but they turn Lincoln, implicitly, into a sort of time traveler — an approach that is both provocative and problematic.
