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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Douglas L. Wilson, 1998, Alfred A. Knopf, New York<\/p>\n
I had always eyed this book as it surely targeted a subject that I was interested in: the transformation of Abrahams Lincoln from a backwoods youth to\u00c2\u00a0the person who had possibly the greatest command of the English language ever.\u00c2\u00a0 While the book did answer some questions for me, unfortunately it bored me to death.<\/p>\n
I think the major problem\u00c2\u00a0with the book is\u00c2\u00a0the author’s approach to the subject.\u00c2\u00a0 He took a forensic approach to each of the events in the period from 1831 to 1842 and tried to logically make a case for the most accurate\u00c2\u00a0accounting of each. The first chapter is about Lincoln’s fight with Jack Armstrong shortly after he arrived in New Salem.\u00c2\u00a0 The author goes through several different accounts of this event and tries to determine which is the most likely.\u00c2\u00a0 The chapter went on and on to the point where I had to skip about twenty-five pages because it was so redundant.\u00c2\u00a0 Also, it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference which accounting was the most accurate as the point was that a\u00c2\u00a0fight occurred where Lincoln was involved and, as a result, he earned some new found respect that he previously didn’t have.\u00c2\u00a0 ‘Nuff said!<\/p>\n
After skipping much of that chapter, I went on to read the rest of the book.\u00c2\u00a0 It followed the same path but I eventually made it through to the end.<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, I discovered that Lincoln in his early years was prone to making personal attacks on his opponents via anonymous articles submitted to the local newspapers (Twitter wasn’t invented at that time).\u00c2\u00a0 This behavior was fairly despicable, even for those times.\u00c2\u00a0 It eventually caused Lincoln to be challenged to a duel.\u00c2\u00a0 I also learned that he had a penchant for reading Shakespeare and Byron’s poetry.\u00c2\u00a0 I think this\u00c2\u00a0might have been a key to his mastery of the English language in his later years.<\/p>\n
I think the book could have been a lot more enjoyable to read if the author had\u00c2\u00a0dispensed with a lot of the detail and\u00c2\u00a0focused\u00c2\u00a0more on his conclusions.\u00c2\u00a0 This would have made the book a lot shorter, but he also\u00c2\u00a0could have expanded the time period he examined beyond 1842 as I don’t believe the entire “transformation”\u00c2\u00a0had been completed by that time.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0There were a lot more events\u00c2\u00a0that influenced Lincoln after\u00c2\u00a01842 including his\u00c2\u00a0term in Congress, his family life, etc., that made him the man who was elected in 1860.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Douglas L. Wilson, 1998, Alfred A. Knopf, New York I had always eyed this book as it surely targeted a subject that I was interested in: the transformation of Abrahams Lincoln from a backwoods youth to\u00c2\u00a0the person who had …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[15,20,16,38],"class_list":["post-2095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-fiction","tag-history","tag-non-fiction","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2095"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2097,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095\/revisions\/2097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}