Nov 19th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Team of Rivals
So has anyone actually read this book? I think it’s a book I’ve been known to pretend to read in the past. In general, I’d be more comfortable with a president drawing lessons from serious historical scholarship rather than these kind of pop histories they sell in airports.
UPDATE: Sources are telling me it’s a good book. Disparaging remarks rescinded pending me getting a copy.
94 Responses to “Team of Rivals”
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November 19th, 2008 at 10:16 am
That seems like a low blow against Ms. Goodwin, given that you haven’t actually read the book. I haven’t read it either, and so don’t know whether you are right or wrong about it’s level of scholarship.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:19 am
You coastal elitist, you.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:23 am
While it’s aimed at a lay audience, it’s not really a “pop” history (despite Goodwin’s frequent Daily Show appearances).
November 19th, 2008 at 10:24 am
I have, and it certainly is a fine biography of a time, if a little too immediately enamored with Lincoln throughout. I really wish people would stop making the comparison, though. Obama’s administration will be a lot of things, but it will not be A) The Lincoln Administration, B) FDR’s Administration or C) Based on Team Of Rivals or D) The last season of The West Wing, and I wish the internet would stop talking about it like it will.
Are these comparisons helpful to anybody? I can’t imagine they’re anything but dorky history-wonk fun, but they seem to get laid out everywhere.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:24 am
In general, I’d be more comfortable with a president drawing lessons from serious historical scholarship rather than these kind of pop histories they sell in airports.
In general, I’d be more comfortable with a Prez who pretended to draw lessons from such pop history bulljive to placate the dumbass Villagers, while actually doing The Right Thing.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:24 am
For an interesting and balanced review by someone who read the book, see yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-pinsker18-2008nov18,0,1022347.story
Gist of the story is that forming the “team of rivals” helped hold the North together during the early days of the CIvil War, but that the group didn’t work well together as a Cabinet.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:24 am
That’s a tough comment. Have you actually read any of her ‘pop history’ books? Both No Ordinary Time and Team of Rivals in my mind are ‘readable’ history supported by serious scholarship.
Books shouldn’t be dismissed merely because they’re popular.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:24 am
I’ve, erm, read the title. And can spell Goodwin’s middle name on the first try, usually, and am familiar with the subject matter and (vaguely) with the thesis. I still get cocktail party points for that, right?
And god-dammit Kervick, if you mean it to be a possessive, it’s just “its.” No apostrophe. If you think our humble host Matt would accept such grammatical carelessness, well… well….
November 19th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Goodwin has a Ph.D. from Harvard, where she taught a course on the American presidency for awhile. Just because its readable doesn’t make it non-scholarly.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Good ideas can come from fiction as well as scholarly histories. … Bad ones, too.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Shorter MY: Nobody has read this book they sell in airports, which is no good even though I haven’t read it.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:37 am
I read it. Look, a lot of people seem to make a living by slapping “Blah blah blah: the blah that changed the world forever” on a book and selling it in airports. Usually, those books are about trivial subjects, short historical episodes, or subjects that left a limited historical trail (Shakespeare’s biography a key one) whose elements have already been analyzed to death.
Lincoln’s cabinet is a historically significant subject for a book involving important figures and a tremendous amount of archival raw materials. I don’t think the book deserves to be dismissed because it appears next to “The World Is Flat” and the latest Dr. Phil book in the window display.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Jim W’s point raises an interesting question: Was Lincoln really as great a president as the writing of history indicates? Would a different president have presided over a Civil War that lasted 2 years instead of 4?
November 19th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Also: Chase was from Cincinnati, so of course he was a pain in the ass.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I’ve read it too and would recommend it. While I am careful choosing popular histories, because most are a waste of time, this really isn’t. If you don’t know a lot about the era or Lincoln it isn’t a bad choice. Also Matt, while I tend to agree with your scorn of a lot of this “history-buff” type reading and, even worse, Washington-history (that worships the Presidency and doesn’t take into account institutional, economic, international, or cultural factors) that pundits and hangers-on like to read, once in a while it is nice to just read a well-crafted book on an era and a president. This is a good one in that genre–and as others have noted she does take her scholarship seriously. She isn’t writing for an academic audience, and she isn’t contributing to the academic conversation on Lincoln or the era, but she is writing a good synthesis history based on the best scholarship, some orginal research, and an interesting hook (i.e. the team of rivals). One could do worse.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:41 am
What an incredibly snotty, ignorant thing to say.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I read the book and thought it was excellent. Two things struck me as being relevant to the current historial situation.
First, Lincoln comes off extremely well as a manager of men. He does make his fair share of tactical mistakes, but is generally quite good at handling difficult personalities.
Second, Lincoln never could’ve done what he did in today’s media era-see this guy for more clarification: http://oratoricalanimal.typepad.com/oratorical_animal/2008/11/team-of-rivals.html
November 19th, 2008 at 10:42 am
That seems like a low blow against Ms. Goodwin, given that you haven’t actually read the book.
I think Doris Kearns Goodwin, plagiarist, can handle the low blow.
http://www.slate.com/id/2062807/
November 19th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I read it just after Sean Wilentz’s magisterial “The Rise of American Democracy” and in many ways “Team of Rivals” was the easier, breezier read. It’s a lesser book, though. DKG writes a little too breathlessly for my tastes, relying on her “Meet the Press” persona to advance an argument that a more academic approach would puncture. She’s too in-love with the pageantry of personalities and neglects the complex reasons that were roiling the young country prior to the Civil War. She’s writing for her teevee audience — that is to say, the Washington chattering classes.
Wilentz, by contrast, spends literally hundreds of pages analyzing the post-Jackson period: electoral results state-by-state throughout the 1850s, op-eds on slavery from Northern as well as Southern papers, the crucial roles played by such under-appreciated villains as John C. Calhoun and Roger Taney. It takes forever to get through “The Rise of American Democracy” but it’s much more useful than DKG’s admittedly entertaining read.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:42 am
DTM,
Sure, it can be talked about, and is ad nauseam, but it doesn’t mean I can’t be annoyed by it. I am in fact getting quite good at being annoyed by it.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I’ve read it. Lincoln is a fascinating man, and I’ve read several biographies of him. One of the things that makes him fascinating is the way that some of the men who initially denigrated him came to be devoted to him. Stanton is the most striking example. There’s a lot of inherent drama in those relationships, which I’m guessing is why Ms. Goodwin decided to make that the theme of her book. I would say anyone looking to Goodwin’s book as a blueprint for how to put a cabinet together is missing the point of the book.
I would recommend David Herbert Donald’s bio ahead of Team of Rivals, if you’re just looking to reacquaint yourself with Lincoln. (He detested being called “Abe,” by the way.)
November 19th, 2008 at 10:45 am
It’s a pretty good account, but the upshot is that the idea only sort of works: Seward did a good job as Sec. of State, but Chase (while being not terrible at his job) was terribly disloyal and didn’t learn his lessons (Seward was disloyal, but learned), and Cameron was a terrible Secretary of War.
Moreover, Lincoln did what he did for clear political reasons – the Republican Party was brand-new, he had vaulted over more senior people to grab the nomination, and if the leading figures of the Party he displaced came out against him, they’d tear the Party (itself a conglomeration of Whigs and Democrats) apart in the midst of a civil war.
Obama doesn’t face the same situation. Clinton wasn’t going to bolt, just be a pain in the ass to deal with. The Democrats are much more unified with much more of an institutional and historical foundation as a party. However, it may be that Obama wants this as a way of getting potential rivals out of contention for 2012 and on his side, as a way of re-branding the party as the Obama Democratic Party, and because he believes he can make them team players and benefit from the added lustre.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Lincoln’s biggest weakness was that he was way too deferential to his generals, particularly McClellan, who emerges as being Cheneyesque in terms of his villiany.
Funny, I’ve always thought that Lincoln’s greatest weakness (a la Cheney himself) was being insufficiently deferential to the generals, such that he thought that he knew better than they how war should be conducted. Lincoln’s promotion of a string of incompetents to the highest levels of command, for the sole reason that they were “aggressive,” unnecessarily prolonged the war and send tens of thousands of men needlessly to their deaths.
And in exalting the ham-handed attrition monkey Grant, he also managed to bequeath us one of the worst presidencies in American history.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Maybe Obama picked Biden because he likes Goodwin so much? They have something in common.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:51 am
I read the book and found it fascinating. I’m not qualified to say whether it is pop history as opposed to some other kind of history. I think Obama tends to be a kind of Rorschach, remaining an unknown quantity, so people either project their hopes or fears onto him. This “hope he’s like Lincoln” meme is an example of that. I’m not neutral–I’m thrilled that he got elected. I think he does seem to share some of Lincoln’s traits–his humiliity, his patience, both of which free him up to think very rationally about what is politically best. If he surrounds himself with competent people and exposes himself to those with divergent views, then we will have made great strides forward right off the bat, I think. Aside from any lessons we can learn from Lincoln.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:52 am
What an incredibly snotty, ignorant thing to say.
Seconded. Especially for a Harvard elitist who never learned how to spell.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I also have actually read this book. I am a huge Civil War buff and have my undergrad degree in History. It was definitely one of more “user-friendly” biographies of Lincoln available. It is extremely well-written and a terrible piece of scholarship either. It can get a little flowery at times, especially when talking about some of the tangentially-related individuals (Chase’s daughter, for instance), but it is a thoroughly enjoyable book.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Wow, Matt, that was pretty harsh. Here I thought I was part of the coastal egghead intellectual elite and I’ve read some of Goodwin’s books!
I had no idea they were sub-Crichton genre history, not serious history. Thanks for setting me straight.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:55 am
The above should read “not a terrible piece of scholarship either.”
Looks like I never did learn the rule about proof-reading.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Yes that Lumpenproletariat Matt. How dare they get their learn on. Sheesh.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:57 am
I don’t necesarily want a president who has time to explore a a lot of “serious historical scholarship”, unless that used to be his day job.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:58 am
We’ve come a long way.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Let’s be cautious of reading too much into what Obama is reading. Like any reader, he has a mind of his own that can probably take away a few interesting ideas from a book while maintaining a critical distance. The Team of Rivals analogy is probably a shorthand way for him to profess at least a nominal interest in working closely with highly-qualified people whose opinions differ from his own in significant ways.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I’m with MattY!
I’ve never read any of her books, but DKG is certainly the conventional-wisdom hack’s hack/tell ‘em what they want to hear at villager’s cocktail parties when she makes her frequent appearances on Meet the Press.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Whoa! Harsh condemnation after admitting not reading the book. This is something I would have expected by any number of NRObots at “The Corner” but certainly not here. Very disappointed (and yes, I’ve read it).
November 19th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I’ve read the book, and I would agree with those who say that it shouldn’t be dismissed as fluff just because it’s written and packaged for a middlebrow audience. Goodwin Kearns, for all her faults, does do some serious archival research.
What the book does well is to tear down the “Honest Abe” mythology of the simple country gentleman who saved America with his incorruptible leadership and heartland values, and re-mythologize him as a brilliant political operator who had the unique gifts necessary to hold the union together. This is, I think, an improvement. There’s something to be said for treacly liberal pop historians who refuse to concede the entire genre to the Jonah Goldbergs of the world.
I am somewhat concerned about the extent to which Obama is embracing this leadership model, but I do think that there are far worse models for him to embrace. A President elected on a message of reconciliation and tamping down partisanship will be hard-pressed to maintain public support for an aggressively partisan New Deal-style agenda. That’s not the “change” people thought they were voting for. If he wants to expand health care and promote a large green-energy stimulus in his first year, keeping his enemies close and stroking their egos is a good way to prolong the honeymoon and avoid the intra-party meltdowns of Carter and Clinton’s first years.
My concern is for what happens when the honeymoon ends, and we’re stuck with a cabinet full of divas and malcontents, with no Civil War to focus their attentions on national unity.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Does anybody remember the 2006-vintage lie Bush told about reading several dozen books a year, including Camus? It was something like 60 or 90 books a year.
Bush claimed this after taking hits for several years as somebody who didn’t read books, magazines, newspapers, or reports specifically written for him. So one day he claimed to have read something like 60 books a year.
And I realized – there really is something worse than a president who doesn’t read: a president who has time to read 1 or 2 books a week.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Team of Rivals is a damned good piece of work. It’s pretty funny to hear about pop history airport books from a guy who spends his days writing 1- or 2-paragraph blog posts based on his reactions to other people’s 1- or 2-paragraph blog posts. Read a book, Matt.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Matt’s probably going to far when he says that Obama is actually drawing lessons from the book (and is probably unfair when he deems it “pop history). It seems to me that Obama is less “drawing lessons” from Kearns-Goodwin’s book than he, in general, likes the idea of having advisors who are willing to disagree with him — which fits the mold of two of our “great” presidents, Lincoln and FDR. But according to Obama himself, he’s also reading a lot of Lincoln (and not just about Lincoln), which to me seems a good sign.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:15 am
@Roddy (#25): David Herbert Donald’s biography is terrific. I re-read that about once a year.
The two things that stand out for me in the Donald biography were 1) Lincoln’s strong emphasis on rational thought and 2) The magnetism that drew other people to him. Lincoln’s rationality made him a very reserved man (his jokes notwithstanding) and it’s pretty clear that only a handful of people, like his wife and Joshua Speed, got a glimpse of his inner life. But it also made him honest, cool-headed in times of crisis and impressively impervious (if not entirely sealed off) to the swings of public opinion.
On the latter, Lincoln could manage his enemies because of that unspoken charisma. People competed for Lincoln’s attention — from his wife to his law partner to his secretaries — and sometimes found themselves at odds when they didn’t get it or felt that Abe was favoring someone else. Donald doesn’t say this explicitly, but my guess is that Lincoln knew when and how to direct his natural magnetism.
And I agree with everyone else: A post like this shows Yglesias at his worst. Snide, sweeping and wholly uninformed. You can do better, Matt.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Well, TOR is no “Heads in the Sand”, I’ll give you that. And I know this because you can’t find HITS on sale at any airport in America. Or even a lot of bookstores.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Since when does Jonah “Bleg” Goldberg write this blog?
November 19th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Yes, I’m afraid I find your comment a bit snotty, Matt. I don’t watch the PBS Newshour much these days, but for many years I did, and Goodwin appeared regularly, and always impressed me as smart and thoughtful. There’s a wierd irony here that here we have a President-elect who is actually interested in history, in contrast to our current moron-in-chief, but you’re criticizing him because his book selections aren’t academic enough.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:31 am
“Sources are telling me it’s a good book”
And giving you a major beating! You had better read and then review Team of Rivals fast to calm us ravaging hoards.
November 19th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Professor Matthew Pinsker rebuts Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” thesis in an op-ed in yesterday’s LA Times.
It may sometimes be easier to get “Lincoln was really bitchen” books as well as “Lincoln was pretty sucky” books more attention than “Lincoln was kind of smart and self-disciplined but also kind of a jerk and a bungler” books.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.
James Bryce, introduction, The American Commonwealth (1888)
November 19th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I have read the book, enjoyed it. What struck me was just how radical the Rebublican party was at it’s founding. Seeking to abolish slavery was far from mainstream thinking. Even Lincoln did not embrace that ideal. How the party has changed, and not for the better.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Matt would do well to quote this in a self-deprecating update.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Having read Goodwin’s book, I would say Pinsker’s op-ed sounds pretty plausible. Chase throughout sounds like a diaster as does Cameron from another perspective; whereas Seward comes out well in Goodwin’s telling.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
It is a popular history, but good popular history.
The team of rivals ides is, however, irrelevant to Obama and his cabinet. No modern president relies on his cabinet in the way that a 19th C. president such as Lincoln did. Lincoln had no NSC, no Office of Budget and Management, no Council of Economic Advisors (and so on for the whole Executive Office of the President), nor did he have a west wing full of advisors. The EOP and White House staff are the engines of the modern presidency, not the Cabinet. (Didn’t we cover this in Intro to US Government?)
November 19th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
@Linus #51. Pinsker’s article ignores the fundamental reason Lincoln put his enemies in his cabinet: The Republican Party of 1861 was a very loose coalition of abolitionists, businessmen and a string of former Whigs, Democrats and Know-Nothings from around the the ideological and geographic spectrum. To cement the party, Lincoln needed to give all these factions a seat in his administration; Lincoln remembered very keenly how factional warfare helped destroy the Whig Party. He probably did not want to put Simon Cameron in the War Department, but if he didn’t the GOP would have been severely weakened in Pennsylvania. Seward was a somewhat left-of-center Whig; Chase was a strong abolitionist. The appointments provided a foundation for Republican unity after its first big win.
After the 1864 election, the party was more or less united behind Lincoln and the president could appoint cabinet members more personally loyal to him. Abe did manage the personalities as well as might be expected, but the appointments were less about him than putting down a foundation for the Republican Party.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
There’s something to be said for treacly liberal pop historians who refuse to concede the entire genre to the Jonah Goldbergs of the world.
I agree. My view of Goodwin has gone up actually.
I am somewhat concerned about the extent to which Obama is embracing this leadership model, but I do think that there are far worse models for him to embrace. A President elected on a message of reconciliation and tamping down partisanship will be hard-pressed to maintain public support for an aggressively partisan New Deal-style agenda. That’s not the “change” people thought they were voting for. If he wants to expand health care and promote a large green-energy stimulus in his first year, keeping his enemies close and stroking their egos is a good way to prolong the honeymoon and avoid the intra-party meltdowns of Carter and Clinton’s first years.
This was discusssed during the primary. Some Obama supporters like me say, yes, we’ll see after he takes office. But what he actually campaigned for was to end the pointless partisan bickering and nonsense of the Bush and Clinton years (the Baby boomer culture wars). Probably some of this is directed at young people and I can see how it could irritate some who feel of course not all of the issues of the culture wars are going to just melt away.
But during the 90s and this decade there was a lot of partisan bs nonsense which just muddies the waters and probably helps the rightwing more.
Obama is younger than most politicians and does seem “new” so maybe there is potential for a bipartisanship that gets Obama’s agenda enacted while at the same time making some of the serious non-bs conservatives happy in small ways. We’ll see.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Having just completed TOR, and not as someone who would take the time to read a purely academic history of the time, I found it very engaging. I chose to read it based on the generally positive reviews by Goodwin’s scholarly peers.
I agree that analogies to today are tenuous, except for this. We have just endured a period where one political party sought to divide us in every way possible for narrow political gain. They largely succeeded in creating a deeply divided nation. Obama won in large part because he used language of national unity to engage a nation in despair over its future. As the Chicago Tribune said in their endorsement: “When Obama said at the 2004 Democratic Convention that we weren’t a nation of red states and blue states, he spoke of union the way Abraham Lincoln did.”
Applying a team of rivals approach to his cabinet and government is part and parcel to his message of national unity.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Pop history? That’s awfully dismissive coming from someone who just admitted that they hadn’t even read the book.
I read a LOT and I mostly read histories and biographies and “Team of Rivals” is an excellent book.
But I didn’t go to Dalton and Harvard and I don’t live in D.C. so really, what do I know? I’m essentially just Cleatus the Slack Jawed Yokel with a law degree.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
It’s okay Steve Balboni, even yokels need lawyers.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
great book. wouldn’t call it pop art in the slightest.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Team of Rivals is a very good book. Not in the first rank of popular history (ie, Robert Caro and Ron Chernow) but very much in the second, perhaps in the lead. Goodwin is fantastic on the political machinations leading up to the election of 1860. Whoever said that she ends up measuring the other players by their devotion to Lincoln is correct, and she doesn’t shed a huge amount of new light on the politics of the Lincoln presidency itself.
Specifically, I thought she gave Chase short shrift. He was undoubtedly an ambitious politician and not entirely loyal to the Lincoln administration, but that was because he came to identify his own political success with the success of the abolitionist movement, so even after Lincoln veered in his direction in late 1862, Chase didn’t reap the political benefit and that galled him.
I also think it’s a mistake to fault Lincoln for choosing a string of “incompetent” generals. McClellan was a political choice and he was highly competent at conducting a war that was consistent with the south choosing to rejoin the union at any time with no change from the political status quo anti-bellum. By late 1862, it was clear that despite pursuing this political strategy, the south was not going to give up, so Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, armed the slaves, and turned to Grant to conduct a war aimed at coercing the south to 1. rejoin the union and 2. do so with major societal changes.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
It’s a really good book IMHO. Particularly humble because I’m a scientist and not an historian. On the other hand, I DID get a better grade in History 59 at Yale than History major George W. Bush.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
This from the author of that scholarly treatise Heads in the Sand
Who also brathlessly posts the new [circa 1985] idea below that US defense procurement acts as a de facto industrial policy.
The “pop internationalists” that Krugman wrote about with such disdain 10-15 years ago have nothing on today’s pop international relationists cum experts on a wide range of topics they now zilch about.
November 19th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Matt, you should read “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” by Pierre Bayard. Not only is this a quite enjoyable book, but Bayard makes some good points about what we do when we read, how our assumptions about the type of book it is influence how we understand it, how long you can actually remember something you read well enough to talk about it knowledgeably(re-read page 1 after finishing a book for a good illustration of this), and so forth. Bayard would advise that you should not have admitted you hadn’t read DKG’s book (which I actually am currently reading and enjoying), you should merely have stated your opinion of the book. You would have been on much firmer ground.
November 19th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
How the party has changed, and not for the better.
Oh, I dunno. The Republican Party was founded by people who believed slavery should be eliminated, and that blacks were inferior to whites. What’s changed?
November 19th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
The book was great. I understand Spielberg is using it to formulate the story of his Lincoln movie.
November 19th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I’ve read it and I don’t think most of the people buzzing about it are keying on it for much more than the title sounds interesting right now. The core message of the book is not that gathering rivals and enemies around oneself is per se a good idea or a smart idea. It is that we once had a man as president who was so extraordinary that although he made choices about people that even he worried might not be good ones, he was able to work with them to achieve outcomes that ultimately proved to be very good. The other part that struck me is that most of these people possessed a sense of personal honor that is sorely missing today. These weren’t Alberto Gonzales types that he was working with.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Uh, Matt? Be less of a lazy fucker. Unless you’re looking to become a glibertarian pontificator.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
I’ve generally found this blog to be mildly informative and vaguely entertaining. The last several days have cured me of that misapprehension.
/unsubscribe
November 19th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Team of Rivals is an excellent work of historical scholarship, and for an era of history that has been treated by numerous books, both good and bad, offers an original point of view. It was not written as an advice book for cabinet-making, and should not be taken as such.
But as history, it is first-rate.
November 19th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, where does plagarism fit in?
November 19th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I liked Gore Vidal’s Lincoln better.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I wish more people would read history and more academics could or would write for the general market. Even when scholars due publish an approachable book, unless it wins the Pulitzer, it seems to get drowned out by all the crap that is out there.(check out the history section at your local chain book emporium and coffee shop) The problem with DKG and Ambrose (and others) is their sometimes sloppy research (most likely done by someone else) and the plagirism.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Nobody reads books anymore. It’s all blogs, blogs, blogs.
November 20th, 2008 at 4:47 am
I read the book. It reminded me of Kapital, Summa Theologiae, and Proclus’s Elements of Theology. Oh, and Beowulf a bit, too.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
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December 25th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
As one who is slowly but surely pursuing history as a profession , I must say that in general Goodwin is not well regarded by historians, and the general thesis of her book on Lincoln is not really tenable. See for a more detailed argument and a couple of links to op-eds by noted Lincoln scholars who argue that we have very little to learn from the “team of rivals” thesis.
Incidentally Goodwin got her Ph.D. in government, not history, and she got her start by writing a quasi-official biography of LBJ. She writes well though, which is a problem for most historians.
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