To him, Meacham tells us, “the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and pursue the right.” A leader besieged by depression working to find hope, a military leader confronting despair struggling to find faith, Lincoln above all was a president preoccupied with the struggle to find right in a period of wrongs.

Meacham is a man of hope and faith, and this book, infused with the very religious overtones that Lincoln applied to politics, is a portrait of a man who during the trial of the Civil War sought comfort in the Book of Job. His new work, “ And There Was Light,” will fit comfortably onto the Lincoln bookshelf, joining these other luminous volumes, complementing them and in some ways displacing them, perhaps nudging them an inch-and-a-quarter to the right to make room for it at the forefront of the Lincoln canon.Īnd what coursed through his mind when - perhaps feeling mystic chords of memory himself - he wrote of Lincoln, “Yet he defended the possibilities of democracy and the pursuit of justice at an hour in which the means of amendment, adjustment, and reform were under assault”?

Now comes Jon Meacham, himself a Pulitzer winner (for his biography of Andrew Jackson). All of them changed the way we look at the 16th president. There was the estimable “ Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer” from Fred Kaplan in 2008 and the groundbreaking “ The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery” by Eric Foner in 2011. You might have thought that was enough - until Garry Wills published “ Lincoln at Gettysburg” in 1992, or until David Herbert Donald came out with “ Lincoln” in 1995, or until Doris Kearns Goodwin produced “ Team of Rivals” in 2005. That’s how many books have been written about Abraham Lincoln.

And there was light meacham review