Ronald Reagan or Lincolns Sword

Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary Leader

Author: Dinesh DSouza

In this enlightening new look at one of our most successful, most popular, and least understood presidents, bestselling author and former Reagan aide Dinesh D'Souza shows how this "ordinary" man was able to transform the political landscape in a way that made a permanent impact on America and the world. Ronald Reagan is a thoughtful and honest assessment of how this underestimated president became a truly extraordinary leader.

Interesting book: Doing Exemplary Research or Successful Strategic Planning

Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words

Author: Douglas L Wilson

Abraham Lincoln now occupies an unparalleled place in American history, but when he was first elected president, a skeptical writer asked, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?” Literary ability was, indeed, the last thing the public expected from the folksy, self-educated “rail-splitter,” but the forceful qualities of Lincoln’s writing eventually surprised his supporters and confounded his many critics. Since his assassination in 1865, no American’s words have become more familiar or more admired, and their enduring power has established him as one of our greatest writers. Now, in a groundbreaking study, the distinguished Lincoln scholar Douglas L. Wilson demonstrates that exploring Lincoln’s presidential writing provides a window onto his presidency and a key to his accomplishments.

Lincoln’s Sword tells the story of how Lincoln developed his writing skills, how they served him for a time as a hidden presidential asset, how it gradually became clear that he possessed a formidable literary talent, and it reveals how writing came to play an increasingly important role in his presidency. “By the time he came to write the Gettysburg Address,” Wilson says, “Lincoln was attempting to help put the horrific carnage of the Civil War in a positive light, and at the same time to do it in a way that would have constructive implications for the future. By the time he came to write the Second Inaugural Address, fifteen months later, he was quite consciously in the business of interpreting the war and its deeper meaning, not just for his contemporaries but for what he elsewhere called the‘vast future.’ ”

Illustrated with reproductions of Lincoln’s original manuscripts, Lincoln’s Sword affords an unprecedented look at a distinctively American writer.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

The most engaging portions of this book deal with Lincoln's habits of composition and the central place that writing played in his life. Mr. Wilson suggests that for the president writing was a form of refuge, "a place of intellectual retreat from the chaos and confusion of office where he could sort through conflicting options and order his thoughts with words."

Publishers Weekly

Ever since publication of Garry Wills's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), the woods have been alive with considerations of Lincoln's rhetoric, both spoken and written, by among others Henry Mark Holzer, Allen C. Guelzo and Ronald C. White. Thus this new work by Wilson (author of the Lincoln Prize winner Honor's Voice) is necessarily redundant. Wilson's emphasis aside from placing key remarks into historical context is on applying excruciatingly detailed and tireless (sometimes tiresome) textual analysis to such utterances as Lincoln's farewell to Springfield, Ill.; the First Inaugural; the July 4th, 1861, message to Congress; the Emancipation Proclamation; and the Gettysburg Address. Robert Lincoln recalled his father as "a very deliberate writer, anything but rapid." It is Lincoln's very deliberate, painstaking, multidraft process that Wilson seeks to document. Readers deeply immersed in Lincoln trivia will find Wilson's intricate forensics inviting. Others, nurturing a more casual interest, will fast find themselves drowned in details of subtle variations between drafts of Lincoln's various major addresses, all so carefully dissected in order to reveal the mechanical, trial-and-error process that lay behind Lincoln's soaring eloquence. 50 b&w illus. (Nov. 17) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

Prologue     3
Springfield Farewell     10
A Long Foreground     19
A Custom as Old as the Government     42
The Message of July 4, 1861     71
Proclaiming Emancipation     105
Public Opinion     143
Rising with Each New Effort     162
The Gettysburg Address     198
A Truth That Needed to Be Told     238
Epilogue: A Notable Elevation of Thought     279
Lincoln's Postdelivery Revisions of the Gettysburg Address     285
Acknowledgments     295
Notes     297
Index     335