Lincoln on Leadership for Today: Abraham Lincoln’s Approach to 21st-Century Issues

Phillips’s topical follow-up to his earlier Lincoln on Leadership begins by describing the nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln at his mother’s deathbed, listening to her last words: “Be good to one another.” That sets the tone for this intelligent and often moving look at one of the nation’s greatest presidents. Phillips portrays Lincoln as a gentle and sensitive boy who became the same type of leader, trying to maintain the Union in his early presidency while dealing with high casualty rates and soldiers gone AWOL. While Lincoln was a conscientious congressman who often made bipartisan overtures, he also took care to denounce the “evil spirit” of corruption he saw in Washington, D.C. Elsewhere, Phillips recalls a momentous biblical quotation from one of Lincoln’s early senate campaigns, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Using his extensive knowledge of Lincoln, Phillips makes convincing cases throughout for what the 19th-century statesman’s opinion would be on a wide array of issues faced by the 21st-century U.S., including climate change, torture, immigration, and equal pay for women. For readers who find present-day politics almost too much to contemplate, Phillips’s closing vision of Lincoln witnessing the “current state of affairs” will be especially poignant and bittersweet. [em]Agent: Bob Barnett, Williams & Connolly. (Feb.) [/em]