PositiveThe NationChanneling Shakespeare, Lincoln’s favorite author, Blumenthal has assembled an extensive dramatis personae to stand at the front of each book, but in his overstuffed volumes, the narrative effect is less Macbeth or Hamlet than an antebellum version of Game of Thrones. Across these pages, various factions of House Jackson and House Clay jockey for power in the capital, even as a more desperate and more elemental struggle—over the future of slavery and freedom on the continent—begins to take shape … This is the history of politics as a history of politicians. Yet on the politicians themselves, Blumenthal delivers the goods. Although Lincoln did not found the mass antislavery movement, when it arrived in 1854, he soon became one of its indispensable leaders.
