He named a list of the seven best books by U.S. presidents, including:Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832–1858, edited and annotated by Don E. FehrenbacherRead about another book on the list.
From the man Fred Kaplan called “the [Mark] Twain of our politics,” this is the first of two collections of Lincoln’s writings. The second is more reflective of Lincoln the statesman, while this one better reveals Lincoln the man with its hundreds of pages of letters to friends, colleagues, and to his wife, as well as the early speeches that made him a national figure (such as “House Divided,” delivered in Springfield, Illinois, in June 1858) and “Fragment on the Struggle Against Slavery,” written in July 1858. Also, if you want to see exactly how far the level of presidential campaign rhetoric has fallen over 15 decades, there is the entire text of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
--Marshal Zeringue
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