It’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.
If they belabor their main thesis at times, authors Harold Holtzer, a Lincoln historian, and Norton Garfinkle, an economist, succeed in presenting a thought-provoking case, quoting Lincoln extensively to buttress their analysis.
... [Holzer and Garfinkle] forcefully and persuasively argue that Lincoln’s understanding of American exceptionalism—America as the 'last best hope of earth'—was that the United States was founded to be a land not just of civil equality and political democracy, but also of 'economic democracy.'
