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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Pulitzer Prizewinning biographerJon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln charting howand whyhe confronted secession threats to democracy and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America

Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our timeHenry Louis Gates Jr

Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award One of the Best Books of the Year The Christian Science Monitor Kirkus Reviews

A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twentyfirstcentury moment of polarization and political crisis Hated and hailed excoriated and revered Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money race identity and faith In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations

At once familiar and elusive Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidentsa remote iconor as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction This illuminating new portrait gives us a very human Lincolnan imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment essential to the story of justice in America began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community who insisted that slavery was a moral evil and who sought as he put it to do right as God gave him to see the right

This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination in 1865 his rise his selfeducation his loves his bouts of depression his political failures his deepening faith and his persistent conviction that slavery must end In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black Americans Lincolns story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a democracy the roots and durability of racism and the capacity of conscience to shape events