Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...skyline is the Hilton tower, 30 stories high. It was built during the Nixon administration, and still feels like a hotel where Howard Hughes might be padding around with Kleenex boxes on his feet up on the top floor. (See video of what it is like to be Mr. Lincoln...
...What's great about this isolation is that Springfield still feels a bit like the city where Abraham Lincoln once strode the streets. There was more horse dung and dust then, to be sure. But nowhere else can you get such an intimate glimpse of the man in this bicentennial year of Lincoln's birth...
Rather than a biographical re-hash - wise, for possibly only Jesus bests Lincoln in the number of published books devoted to a single person - Gopnik offers a meditation on each man's most literary qualities: Lincoln's deceptively simple legalistic language and Darwin's crystalline powers of observation. And what could have been a gimmick (a book timed to twin bicentennials is as close as historical biographies get to a home run) becomes something more, a learned treatise that worships learning. Gone is the overly twee writing of Gopnik's memoir-inflected works (Paris to the Moon, Through the Children...
...origin of Lincoln's facility with words: "The frontier America of Lincoln's youth was first of all a rhetorical society, where the ability to speak in public, at length was central to social ambitions; giving a speech in 1838 in Illinois was the equivalent of putting on a play in 1598 in London, the thing you did into which everything else flowed. (We are, by turn - and a writer says it with sadness - essentially a society of images: a viral YouTube video, an advertising image, proliferates and sums up our desires; anyone who can't play the image game...
...with the same time-honored traditions: you chop down a cherry tree, hold a Presidents Day coloring contest in your place of business, and read the Gettysburg Address in the quiet of your home. But when you’ve exhausted all the super sales and “Lincoln was gay” jokes, keep the good times rolling by calling your friends over and getting drunk with the most badass president who ever set foot on Air Force One: Harrison Ford, a.k.a President James Marshall. TAKE A SHOT… 1. Every time the President ices a terrorist...