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| | | | Category Full 1 | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Presidents & Heads of State |
| Category Full 2 | HISTORY / United States/Civil War Period |
| Category Full 3 | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical |
| | | | Inserts/Illus | rough front; 41 b&w thru/out; endpapers; |
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Sidney Blumenthal, Author |
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| | | About the BookBacklistOther FormatsProduct Images | “Magisterial...A vividly written, wide-ranging and often surprising account of the president-to-be.” —The New York Times Book Review “Masterful.” —Los Angeles Times Volume II of Sidney Blumenthal’s acclaimed, landmark biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, reveals the future president’s genius during the most decisive period of his political life when he seizes the moment, finds his voice, and helps create a new political party.
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| | In 1849, Abraham Lincoln seems condemned to political isolation and defeat. His Whig Party is broken in the 1852 election, and disintegrates. His perennial rival, Stephen Douglas, forges an alliance with the Southern senators and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Violent struggle breaks out on the plains of Kansas, a prelude to the Civil War. Lincoln rises to the occasion. Only he can take on Douglas in Illinois, and he finally delivers the dramatic speech that leaves observers stunned. In 1855, he makes a race for the Senate, which he loses when he throws his support to a rival to prevent the election of a proslavery candidate. Now, in Wrestling With His Angel, Sidney Blumenthal explains how Lincoln and his friends operate behind the scenes to destroy the anti-immigrant party in Illinois to clear the way for a new Republican Party. Lincoln takes command and writes its first platform and vaults onto the national stage as the leader of a party that will launch him to the presidency. The Washington Monthly hailed Blumenthal’s Volume I as, “splendid…no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes.” Now, in one of the greatest American success stories, Wrestling With His Angel brings Lincoln from the wilderness to the peak of his career as he takes control of the nation’s most profound spiritual crisis—slavery—and enters the battle for the nation’s soul.
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| | Sidney Blumenthal is the acclaimed author of A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel, the first two volumes in his five-volume biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and Washington editor and writer for The New Yorker. His books include the bestselling The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and The Permanent Campaign. Born and raised in Illinois, he lives in Washington, DC.
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| | “Sidney Blumenthal’s first volume, A Self-Made Man, wove a broad and intricate counterpoint between the young life of Abraham Lincoln and the politics of Jacksonian America. Blumenthal extends that superb counterpoint in Wrestling With His Angel, giving us the best account we have of the big-screen context of Lincoln and the explosive political events during the decade he strode to the front of the American stage. Blumenthal illuminates the path Lincoln hewed to greatness. This is the best political history we have had of Abraham Lincoln since James G. Randall and Allan Nevins.” — Allen Guelzo, author of Gettysburg, winner of the Lincoln Prize
“Sidney Blumenthal has achieved something quite unexpected: he has rescued the Lincoln most Americans know only as an icon, and turned him back into a real human being, revealing a clever and adroit politician, a fixer of conventions, and a political operator whose ambitions are surpassed only by his searing moral vision.” — Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“A timely and important book. Rather than diminishing his sympathy for the 16th President’s inner turmoil, Blumenthal’s ‘long historical view’ has yielded an exceptionally nuanced and compassionate portrait of Lincoln and the circumstances that shaped his career.” — Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War
“Wrestling With His Angel is a raucous and epic voyage through the turbulent political waters of the age that made Abraham Lincoln. Blumenthal has crafted a Melvillian narrative of the era of secession and the men who navigated it. Completely mesmerizing, a deeply serious meditation with the keen sense of humor that Lincoln so famously had.” — John Witt, author of the Lincoln’s Code, winner of the Bancroft Prize
"Wrestling With His Angel is dramatic narrative history, prophetic and intimate—painfully at times. Blumenthal makes our nation’s moral cleavage appear tragically ordained, perhaps insurmountable, which renders his luminous portrait of Lincoln all the more revelatory.” — Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home
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