Word: shenk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shenk took both a professional and personal interest in the topic of mental illness. “I was used to studying politics and culture and history and was also really depressed myself,” he says, adding that since his late teens he has struggled to manage depression. “I thought that I could chart a course for my own self by studying the subject in my professional work...
...Shenk’s personal experience with depression gives his version of Lincoln an underlying sympathy and sensitivity toward Lincoln’s forlorn thinking. But Shenk says that he has no personal agenda with this book other than to present a new view of Lincoln...
However, this is also a man who translated his “depressive realism,” a term Shenk quotes from psychological literature, into a passion for finding and accomplishing a greater purpose while weathering life’s tribulations...
Like this version of the book’s hero, Shenk is humble, recognizing his own limits as a historian. Referring to some historians’ claims that Lincoln was homosexual, Shenk doesn’t rule out such a possibility, but writes that “with people in history, our understanding is limited by available texts. Intuition and common sense can help, but only if they’re leavened by an awareness that the world we see ‘onstage’ is different from the world we live in.” The fact that...
When he writes of Lincoln’s views on slavery, Shenk is just as sensitive to Lincoln’s cultural environment. Shenk acknowledges that Lincoln was in no way fighting in favor of equal rights for African-Americans—only for the abolition of slavery as an institution...