Well, I did it again! I don’t really need yet another 750 page tome on my reading table, but that’s what I got. A “friend” at church, one whose reading tastes mirror mine, finished reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and casually waved his dog-eared copy before my eyes. I snatched it up before I knew it.

If I wasn’t being made ill by the shenanigans of a certain contemporary Illinois pol, I might have been more resistant. But perhaps not.

I’m still on the shady side of 100 pages, but I’m already entranced by how author Doris Kearns Goodwin has structured her book. She follows the parallel careers of four rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination – New York senator William H. Seward, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s distinguished elder statesman Edward Bates.

Taken together, the lives of these four men give us a picture of the path taken by ambitious young men in the North who came of age in the early decades of the nineteenth century. All four studied law, became distinguished orators, entered politics, and opposed the spread of slavery. Their upward climb was one followed by many thousands who left the small towns of their birth to seek opportunity and adventure in the rapidly growing cities of a dynamic, expanding America.

I look forward to gaining a more accurate impression of Lincoln, and it may prompt me to again dip in to a pair of volumes on my bookshelf: Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858, and 1859-1865. Their bookmarks suggest that I have only read 1/3 of the first and hardly any of the second. Shame on me!

If you don’t hear much from me for a while, you now know the reason. The lengthening days will lure me out of my reading dungeon soon, I hope.

Dave, just hoping his weak eyes hold out a while longer.