You may not have heard of the Lincoln Prize, unless you are a historian, in which case you are certain to be familiar with it, since it is the most generous of its kind, offering a first prize of $40,000. Established by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman to honor the best historical work each year on Lincoln and the Civil War era, the prize is now in its tenth year. First prize for this year, announced last week on Lincoln's birthday, went to Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, by Allen C. Guelzo (Eerdmans), and Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger (Oxford Univ. Press). Guelzo, a B & C contributing editor, is dean of the Templeton Honors College and Grace F. Kea Professor of American History at Eastern College in Pennsylvania.
If you are among the legion of readers who pick up virtually everything on Lincoln, you have probably read Guelzo's book already (or maybe you have it near the bed, halfway down the stack of last year's crop of Lincolniana). Stay tuned in the pages of Books & Culture for a review of Guelzo's book by scholar Richard Carwardine, which will appear later this year. But it would be a shame if Lincoln buffs were the only ones who profited from Guelzo's superb work, which has much to offer readers who, while acknowledging the fascination of our sixteenth and surely greatest president, could somehow manage to live out the rest of their days without opening another biography of Lincoln.
Guelzo's book, in fact, offers nothing less than a rewriting of American intellectual history. Set aside the log-cabin lore and prepare yourself for a feast of scholarship, in which Guelzo re-creates in rich detail the vibrant intellectual life of Lincoln's time. Lincoln, Guelzo persuades us, was above all a man of ideas: a reality obscured by the national mythology.
"We are too numbed by fanfares for the Common Man," Guelzo writes, "by Ralph Waldo Emerson's sniffling laments about the absence of American scholars, by Hollywood glorifications of sharp-shooting hillbillies in coonskin caps, to hear the frantic solemnity with which the most isolated patriarch on the most godforsaken acre of wiregrass would sit up all night alongside a wandering evangelist to discuss the intricacies of predestination and free will, or to hear a Scottish free thinker and an itinerant elder hold two thousand people spellbound for a week in 1829 debating the possibility of intelligent design in the universe."
That gives a taste of the forcefulness and the deeply informed imagination with which Guelzo makes his case. (Another sample can be found in the forthcoming March/April issue of B & C, in Guelzo's essay-review titled "Self-Improvement.") Rarely can a book of this kind be described as a "page-turner," but Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President will keep you reading by the nightlight if not by the flickering glow of a candle or a fire.
Visit Books & Cultureonline at
BooksandCulture.com or subscribe
here.Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer Presidentis available at most book retailers.
Amazon.com's page for the book, however, includes blurbs from The Wall Street Journal and Publisher's Weekly.
See Eastern College's special page about
Redeemer President.In an October 1999 article about the book for
Associated Press(which appeared in
The Washington Post,
CNN,
ABCNews, and elsewhere), AP religion writer Richard Ostling says, "Much has been written about Lincoln's belief and disbelief, but this account goes deeper."
"Dissecting [Lincoln's quest for meaning] forms the core of Redeemer President, and the job Mr. Guelzo does of it is masterly," wrote Bret Louis Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. "It is a testament to the strength of Redeemer Presidentthat the matters it addresses resist easy summary. The value of the book itself, however, is easy to state: Out of the countless volumes written about our 16th president, it ranks quite simply among the best." The January 3 article is available
online, but for a small fee.
Allen Guelzo's articles for Books & Cultureinclude a review of David Herbert Donald's Lincoln (titled The Lost History of American Intellectual Life) in the November/December 1996 [page 25, print only] issue and "Soulless | If consciousness is only an illusion, it's the greatest mistake human beings have ever made" (Jan/Feb 1998, page 20, print only).
Guelzo also reviewedR. C. Sproul's Willing To Believe: The Controversy Over Free Will in the March 2, 1998 issue of Christianity Today.Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:Nancy Drew and the Wine-Dark Sea | The importance of good literature—and how to get young people to read it. By Sarah Cowie (Feb. 14, 2000)
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