Andrew Ferguson, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24). This is not a biography of Abraham Lincoln, much less a scholarly monograph, but a kind of intellectual travel book, an account of the author’s visits to Lincoln-related sites and events across America, in the course of which he meets a wildly diverse assortment of Lincoln-lovers and Abe-haters, most of them eccentric in degrees varying from mildly aberrant to near-pathological. Everything he sees and everyone he encounters along the way is described with an engaging combination of dry, sly wit and what can only be described as empathy (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
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