Lincoln

Relying extensively on resources never before available--recently-opened personal papers, letters, transcripts, newspaper reports--as well as computer-research techniques never before employed, Donald is the first to be able to portray Lincoln in all his complexity, depicting the day-to-day subtleties of his presidency and recreating his world with immediacy and detail.

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The year's most important biography-- of a leader who still speaks to our times In the bestselling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography-- a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.

Culminating his half-century of study of Lincoln and his times, Donald brilliantly traces Lincoln's rise from humble origins to the pinnacle of the presidency. He reveals the development of the future President's character and shows how Lincoln's enormous capacity for growth enabled one of the least experienced men ever elected to high office to become a giant in the annals of American politics. And he depicts a man who was basically passive by nature, yet ambitious enough to take enormous risks and overcome repeated defeats.

Much more than a political biography, "Lincoln" seats us behind the desk of a President who, was both a master of ambiguity and expediency and a great moral leader, as he makes the decisions that preserved the Union and shaped modern America.