Some 16,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln—more than any other historical figure except Jesus. But there has never been one like this one by David S. Reynolds. The author, a literary scholar and historian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has written a marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness ... Like any good biographer, Mr. Reynolds takes us through the important events of Lincoln’s life. But unlike previous biographers, Mr. Reynolds spends an extraordinary amount of time presenting his cultural context. In effect, his biography becomes less a narrative of Lincoln’s life than an explanation of his genius. We come to understand fully why Lincoln did what he did, and why he did it when he did it ... Because Mr. Reynolds knows so much about this forgotten culture of antebellum America—both the high and low parts of it—he is able to recover the often peculiar and evanescent incidents and conditions that influenced Lincoln’s actions and attitudes ... Using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds’s biography so different and so compelling.
Reynolds’s Lincoln is very much an Honest Abe, but he is an updated Abe, fully woke and finely radical ... Reynolds updates Lincoln by doing what scholars do now: he makes biography secondary to the cultural history of the country. Lincoln is seen as a man whose skin bears the tattoos of his time. Cultural patterns are explicated in Abe, and Lincoln is picked up and positioned against them, taking on the coloring of his surroundings, rather like a taxidermied animal being placed in a reconstructed habitat in a nineteenth-century diorama at a natural-history museum. Instead of rising from one episode of strenuous self-making to another, he passes from one frame to the next, a man subsumed ... Reynolds’s cultural history illuminates Lincoln—and particularly his transformation from self-made lawyer into American Abe. Even readers long marinated in the Lincoln literature will find revelation in the way Abe re-situates familiar episodes ... Reynolds’s cultural frames become more arresting as Lincoln’s role grows more public; public people are always cultural objects ... As the war begins, Reynolds’s lens widens in ways that are less appealingly whimsical than in the Barnum case but still more genuinely illuminating ... Sometimes Reynolds’s kind of cultural history demands more suppleness of mind than he displays. When, for instance, he proposes a parallel between Mary Lincoln locked up in the White House and Emily Dickinson isolated in her home, in Amherst, we feel that we are in the presence of a similitude without a real shape: Emily was a Yankee poet of matchless genius, Mary a bewildered Southern woman in an unmanageable role. All they shared was being alone in a big house ... Even with Reynolds’s more compelling examples of anthropological patterns, small whitecaps of uncertainty may stir in the reader’s mind ... Throughout Abe, the terms 'culture' and 'cultural' recur with such hammering relentlessness that one wishes Reynolds’s editor had given him a thesaurus. Not having enough words means not seeing enough types ... What counts is a sense of what counts.
... a prodigious and lucidly rendered exposition of the character and thought of the 16th president ... More character study than narrative biography, this Lincoln portrait ... goes further than most previous studies in probing the complexities and nuances of the man ... At the same time, Reynolds succumbs to a pitfall in drawing conclusions about how particular Lincoln experiences influenced his later thoughts and actions when no evidence for such causal effects is discernible.
David Reynolds’s ambitious biography...illuminates aspects of Lincoln’s significance that elude more conventional biographers. There are perils in this kind of study, and Abe does not escape all of them, especially when it draws strained connections between Lincoln and his cultural surroundings. But Reynolds resists the larger and more damaging temptation to render his subject as the sum of his influences. Reynolds’s Lincoln does not simply reflect his times; he creates them as well ... Writing a comprehensive cultural biography of Lincoln is a large task on its own, but by shifting at times out of culture and into politics, Reynolds has accomplished a good deal more ... The book is especially good on Lincoln’s early backwoods years in Kentucky, Indiana, and finally Illinois ... Covering the rest of Lincoln’s life, Reynolds is prone to informative digressions into larger cultural backgrounds and significances, though his erudition occasionally gets the better of him ... Reynolds also convincingly roots Lincoln’s alternative antislavery politics in his certitude that the abolitionists’ high-minded strategy of moral suasion would stir up trouble but never break the slaveholders’ power ... Abe helps show that the supposedly urgent issue of Lincoln’s racism is more worked up than it is urgent, if indeed it is really an issue at all ... as David Reynolds’s brilliant cultural history reminds us, destroying slavery and saving American democracy had grown from Lincoln’s strategy, not John Brown’s.
Recovering the cultural meaning of the acrobat is typical of the volume’s originality ... Reynolds concludes that Lincoln possessed 'a radically progressive self' and held 'an underlying radicalism on race.' To make this case, Reynolds must excuse Lincoln’s support for Whig enslavers such as Henry Clay and Zachary Taylor, and, although he acknowledges that Lincoln’s early denigration of black suffrage was 'reprehensible,' he dismisses Lincoln’s racist statements as being made 'reluctantly' ... Abe, consistently learned and illuminating, goes a long way toward helping us fathom his transcendence.
David S. Reynolds begins Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times by noting that Jesus Christ is the only historical figure who’s been the subject of more books than the 16th president of the United States. Reynolds’ is one of two impressive recent biographies of Lincoln ... Abe presents a fascinating primer on everyday life in Lincoln’s time ... The author offers up a riot of influences, beginning with Lincoln’s frontier childhood, which featured events like logrollings and house-raisings, bringing together settlers of all classes to help clear land and build homes. He writes admiringly of Lincoln’s voracious interests, which ran from Shakespeare to bawdy humor to Euclidean geometry ... Reynolds compellingly argues that the president drew upon and assimilated these varied cultural strands in order to foster national unity.
... magisterial ... Beyond Lincoln’s frontier upbringing, Reynolds identifies deep historic differences in the American character deriving from English emigrant Puritans and Cavaliers, each struggling to define American polity ... Reynolds pulls together cultural, geographic, religious, social, psychological, military, and literary sources of Lincoln’s remarkable strengths as president. He brings to light some often-overlooked heroes ... Reynolds’ biography moves Lincoln’s life ever forward, inserting digressions without slowing the narrative pace. Even readers who think they know Lincoln’s life deeply will find new insights here. This is sure to win a wide audience. Includes period photos and extensive bibliographic notes.
... magisterial and authoritative ... Close readings of Lincoln's own writings bring insights into his character and thinking, and Reynolds's analysis of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address offer a deeper understanding of those near-sacred political texts, noting, for instance, allusions to the Bible and Euclidean geometry in the Gettysburg speech. With a knack for drawing unexpected but persuasive conclusions, and impressive command of his source material, Reynolds provides a portrait rich in texture and context, not only of Lincoln but of the America he inhabited and helped redefine. The result is a must-read addition to the canon of Lincoln biographies.
Reynolds offers a different take, one that is consistently fun to read ... The author moves fluidly through the eras of Lincoln's life, providing countless telling details that help readers understand how his surroundings shaped his extraordinary character ... According to Reynolds, whose research is staggering, Lincoln was an intellectual sponge, and he made use of his broad knowledge and experiences to help his law clients ... Long but never boring. A fine cultural history and biography that is accessible to all readers, especially students.
