four score and seven years ago text messages

He was the opposite of a blogger language came to him slowly, and his silences are as meaningful as his expressions. “Lincoln’s Sword” reveals Lincoln the craftsman, agonizing over every word. His oratory seems almost as if presented to Americans on tablets, ready to be engraved in marble. We don’t always think of Lincoln as a writer.

He does so by arguing how difficult writing was for Lincoln, how essential the grind of getting the words right was to his well-being and how the result was prose that saved the republic. Wilson, a scholar at Illinois’ Knox College, restores the humanity behind the famous face we see every time we leave a few pennies in a dish by a cash register. Wilson takes the conversation to an even higher level in “Lincoln’s Sword” - not easy to do with our most overanalyzed president. (I wonder, did a canny publisher urge Holzer to get “Lincoln” into the title twice?)Īll are excellent, but Douglas L. and “Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President” by Harold Holzer. AS a child, President Lincoln wrote a bit of doggerel taunting all of us who would find him remarkable: “Abraham Lincoln is my nam / And with my pen I wrote the same / I wrote it in both hast and speed / and left it here for fools to read.” That this ignorant frontier boy became the author of some of the finest public language ever written is a mystery that will never fail to fascinate.Ī boomlet of books about Lincoln’s oratory has flooded the market in recent years, including the seminal “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” by Garry Wills “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural” by Ronald C.

Four score and seven years ago text messages