MixedThe Wall Street JournalPryor exploits her wealth of experience as a diplomat in the State Department to evaluate Lincoln as if he were the president she served. Her six 'encounters' are small historical moments, the kind that most of us overlook and that only a veteran of the governmental process, with knowledge of Capitol Hill and the newspaper-reading habits of those who attempt to forge policy, could tease into life ... Pryor is particularly adept at conveying the impossibility of Lincoln’s task: to represent a profoundly fractured country ... Pryor’s Lincoln is a man of excessive ambition, handicapped by strange looks and profound social awkwardness, whose pragmatism often contradicts his loftier ideals...As is inevitable with a posthumous book, one can’t help wondering if another pass would have gotten the balance slightly better ... Pryor makes a case for Lincoln’s naiveté regarding the resolve of Southern states to defend slavery, both at the war’s start and also at its end, auguring a failed Reconstruction policy ... The insinuation that the drama of Civil War had a narcissistic angle for Lincoln is another place where, it seems likely, a more measured assessment would have emerged if Pryor had lived to complete the project.
