Books

The Quran

Foundational text of Islam. 

As a persuasive text, this seemed stronger than the Bible. It’s clearer, more economical, and it hits its main points harder and more frequently. 

But just as with the Bible, I found little to like in the language or the substance. 

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have made this excursion into religious texts. But I was curious to see if I could find in them what has resonated so much for so many people for so many years.

Abraham Lincoln

Carl Sandburg poetically tells the story of the United States’ sixteenth president. 

It’s a great and good book about a great and good man, but it’s almost kitschy in its self conscious effort to mythologize. Sandburg clearly wanted for it to pass as a proper biography, but it seemed to me that his real goal was to write an American Aeneid. 

One of his unspoken theses is that Lincoln, much more than the founding generation, represented the genesis of the true American spirit at its finest. 

The Prairie Years section, especially, is distractingly poetic in its language. And then after hundreds of pages of getting used to the flowery prose, the book transforms into a direct journalistic account of Lincoln’s role in the war. 

But these are just quibbles. It’s an incredible story of a peerless man at a pivotal time. The book delivers, even if it’s quirky and unabashedly partisan. 

Recommended for fans of history and biography.

Glad you found a book to recommend strongly after a rough few reviews!