The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln

I came to this review armed with a full battery of opinions about Lincoln's political career: Lincoln and the Republican Party, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln and the south, etc. But I needn't have bothered. Such views are largely irrelevant to a book like this. It belongs to a series on American Studies, a subject which has one foot in politics and the other in literature and culture. Befitting this, the authors have tried to see Lincoln through a wide‐angle lens, exploring facets of the sixteenth president which go beyond his life in the White House. A sure sign of this...