And There Was Light

<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES </i>BESTSELLER &#149; Pulitzer Prize&#150;winning biographer&#160;Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln charting how&#151;and why&#151;he confronted secession threats to democracy and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America.</b><br><br> <b>&#147;Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time.&#148;&#151;Henry Louis Gates Jr.</b><br><br><b>Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize &#149; Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award&#160;&#149; One of the Best Books of the Year: <i>The Christian Science Monitor Kirkus Reviews</i></b><br><br>A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated and hailed excoriated and revered Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money race identity and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations.<br><br>At once familiar and elusive Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents&#151;a remote icon&#151;or as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction. This illuminating new portrait gives us a very human Lincoln&#151;an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment essential to the story of justice in America began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community; who insisted that slavery was a moral evil; and who sought as he put it to do right as God gave him to see the right.<br><br>This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination in 1865: his rise his self-education his loves his bouts of depression his political failures his deepening faith and his persistent conviction that slavery must end. In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black Americans Lincoln&#146;s story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a democracy the roots and durability of racism and the capacity of conscience to shape events.