Or, Abraham Lincoln: Cooler Than You Since 1809.
Miller, WIlliam Lee. Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography. New York: Viking, 2002.
I received this book as part of being given my high school's Phi Beta Kappa Award my senior year, and lo these six years later I finally cracked it open and read it...and boy am I glad I did. There have been many, many, many books written on our sixteenth president, but I daresay this one is one of the best, probably precisely because it looks at Lincoln's entire life from the perspective of his ethics. We don't talk about ethics, virtues or morals much anymore (and when we do we only speak of "morals," which personally I hate; you will hear me speak of ethics, though not knowledgably), but all these concepts were alive and well in Lincoln's time, and comparing his ethics and his ideas about ethics and principles in politics to his fellows' is fascinating. To put it briefly, he may well have been the best man ever to occupy the office of President: while the Founding Fathers did well, Abraham Lincoln did right.
( Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. )
Miller, WIlliam Lee. Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography. New York: Viking, 2002.
I received this book as part of being given my high school's Phi Beta Kappa Award my senior year, and lo these six years later I finally cracked it open and read it...and boy am I glad I did. There have been many, many, many books written on our sixteenth president, but I daresay this one is one of the best, probably precisely because it looks at Lincoln's entire life from the perspective of his ethics. We don't talk about ethics, virtues or morals much anymore (and when we do we only speak of "morals," which personally I hate; you will hear me speak of ethics, though not knowledgably), but all these concepts were alive and well in Lincoln's time, and comparing his ethics and his ideas about ethics and principles in politics to his fellows' is fascinating. To put it briefly, he may well have been the best man ever to occupy the office of President: while the Founding Fathers did well, Abraham Lincoln did right.
( Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. )