I was assigned this book for an AP Language teaching workshop I'm due to attend in two weeks. It's very brief, as the speech itself (the second inaugural) was brief. I have previously read Gary Will's Lincoln at Gettysburg with great interest (reread parts of it later). I'm fascinated by the sort of rhetorical analysis these books contain, by Lincoln himself, by the Civil War, and by those times in general. I give this book ****, but if you don't want to read a book in which each paragraph of a speech gets a chapter of analysis dedicated to it, you won't want to read this. I enjoyed whole pages on what "attributes" and "malice" and "charity" meant in the context of the speech.
Here, however. is some interesting historical trivia: the only photo of Lincoln making a speech is of this one, The only piece of furniture on the platform Lincoln spoke from was a white Iron table made by Major Benjamin Brown French from fragments of the recently-replaced iron dome of the Capitol, John Wilkes Booth is visible in the picture behind Lincoln, Lincoln recognized Frederick Douglass in the crowd and later insisted on hearing his opinion of the speech, Douglass called it, "a sacred effort."
Here's the picture:
2 comments:
this book sucked.
Nice analysis throughout. But after reading the whole book, the thing I'm analyzing now is how in the world this guy had the time to analyze the living daylight out of this speech...and put me to sleep in the process.
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