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Jon Meacham

Auteur van American Lion

35+ Werken 12,169 Leden 283 Besprekingen Favoriet van 8 leden

Over de Auteur

Jon Meacham was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on May 20, 1969. He received a degree in English literature at the University of the South. He joined Newsweek as a writer in 1995. Three years later, at the age of 29, he was promoted to managing editor, supervising coverage of politics, international toon meer affairs, and breaking news. In 2006, he was promoted to editor at Newsweek. He is currently an executive editor at Random House. He won the Pulitzer Prize for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House in 2009. His other works include Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. In 2001, he edited Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement. In 2013 his title Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power made The New York Times Best Seller List. In 2015 Meacham's title Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush made The New York Times Best Seller List. His most recent book is entitled The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels (2018). toon minder
Fotografie: 2018 National Book Festival By Avery Jensen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72641799

Werken van Jon Meacham

American Lion (2008) 3,170 exemplaren
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) 2,444 exemplaren
Impeachment: An American History (2018) — Medewerker — 112 exemplaren
Beyond Bin Laden: America and the Future of Terror (2011) — Redacteur; Introductie — 22 exemplaren

Gerelateerde werken

Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games (1989) — Voorwoord, sommige edities202 exemplaren
The Civil War Trilogy (2011) — Redacteur — 89 exemplaren
The Best American Magazine Writing 2010 (2010) — Introductie — 42 exemplaren
Sermons from the National Cathedral soundings for the journey (2013) — Voorwoord, sommige edities8 exemplaren

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I liked the way it focused on his relationships and how they shaped his presidency
 
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cspiwak | 63 andere besprekingen | Mar 6, 2024 |
At 84, I lived through much of the last chapters. I am not sure I agree with the author about America's soul; I am uncertain that it has one. Glad I finished the book.
 
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Elizabeth80 | 47 andere besprekingen | Feb 20, 2024 |
It is obvious that Meacham idolizes Lincoln as he describes Lincoln’s self-education, romances with women, bouts of depression, political successes and failures, and his faith. In America Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents. I don't disagree with this statement but in this book Meacham gives the reader a new portrait of a very human Lincoln, an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment, essential to the story of justice in America, began as he grew up in antislavery Baptist churches. What was surprising to me was the number of times in Lincoln's life that his friends had to watch over him for several weeks or months to prevent him from killing himself. After his first love Ann Rutledge died he was despondent and unable to work for months. When his son Willie died, he had to be watched over again. It is interesting that history tells us that Mary Todd Lincoln lost her mind after this loss. However, Abe was in worse shape. He was suicidal. I counted the number of times that he was suicidal to be 7 times during his life.

Meacham addresses Lincoln’s religious faith by stating in the Prologue:

Raised in an antislavery Baptist ethos in Kentucky and in Indiana, Lincoln was not an orthodox Christian. He never sought to declare a traditional faith. There was no in-breaking light, no thunderbolt on the road to Damascus, no conviction that, as the Epistle to the Philippians put it, “every knee should bow†and declare Jesus as Lord. There was, rather, a steadily stronger embrace of the right in a world of ambition and appetite. To Lincoln, God whispered His will through conscience, calling humankind to live in accord with the laws of love. Lincoln believed in a transcendent moral order that summoned sinful creatures, in the words of Micah, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God—eloquent injunctions, but staggeringly difficult to follow. “In the material world, nothing is done by leaps, all by gradual advance,†the New England abolitionist Theodore Parker observed. Lincoln agreed. “I may advance slowly,†the president reputedly said, “but I don’t walk backward.†His steps were lit by political reality, by devotion to the Union, and by the importuning of conscience. Meacham, Jon. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (pp. 15-16). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“I have often wished that I was a more devout man than I am,†Lincoln said in his White House years. “Nevertheless, amid the greatest difficulties of my Administration, when I could not see any other resort, I would place my whole reliance on God, knowing that all would go well, and that He would decide for the right.†Meacham, Jon. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (pp. 16-17). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Lincoln, who knew slavery, saw it, and was likely exposed to teaching and preaching that declared it wrong. Still, there was something in the faith of his father that kept Lincoln from declaring himself a believer and joining the church in which he was raised. Perhaps he disliked following his father, a parent with whom he had a complicated relationship on the best of days. Perhaps he was uncomfortable with the Baptist expression of predestination, which held that an omnipotent God had previously determined who was to be saved and who was to be damned, a theological assertion derived from John Calvin. Perhaps he never truly felt the call to make a public assent to the claims of the frontier Baptist sect he knew. And perhaps he sensed, at some level, a discrepancy between scripture, which Lincoln was coming to know well, and religious doctrine. Meacham, Jon. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (pp. 60-61). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Lincoln's step-mother Sarah Bush Lincoln recalled. “He read all the books he could lay his hands on.†The psalms of the King James Version were favorites, as were the hymns of Isaac Watts. Meacham, Jon. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (p. 70). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

A president who governed a divided country has alot to teach us in the twenty-first-century given the polarization and political crisis we are currently experiencing. I was amazed at how similar our past is just like our present. There are the same calls for state's rights. In fact, until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the U.S. Constitution was interpreted to mean that the federal government could not force the states to do anything. This is the reason that abolitionist leaning leaders did nothing to stop slavery. Lincoln changed this interpretation which angered both pro-slavery and anti-slavery people. Lincoln also ruled by executive order. He was the first president to do this and we know from current headlines how well this goes over. Citizens called for Lincoln to be assassinated the day after his election and then continued until he was assassinated. Also, he had to come to Washington for his inaugural disguised as someone else. In addition, I was surprised to learn that the southern states began seceding a few days after his election and all but one state had seceded before his inaugural. Southerners knew that Lincoln would outlaw slavery and did not wait until he was in office to take action. There was speculation that they would take over Mexico or the Central American countries and create a new nation based on slavery. Many of the confederate leaders were U. S. Senators and willingly resigned their offices in support of the south.

And There Was Light is a fantastic account of Abraham Lincoln's life. While there is a lot of minutiae concerning his political fights, it is good that we have this record to lean back on.
… (meer)
 
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Violette62 | 9 andere besprekingen | Feb 19, 2024 |
(2012) (Also AudioBook) Very good biography of our 3rd president and probably the most instrumental man in declaring our independence from England. A man with a strong vision of what the new nation should look and act like and who suffered no fools who didn't go along with his vision. He desperately tried to steer the country away from becoming a monarchy and feared that the Federalists (Washington, Adams, Hamilton) would cause that to happen. Because he was such a strong personality, his ?democratic-republicanism? put the nation on the path away from monarchy. He, probably more than any other founder, became the most revered and hated man of his time because of his strength of vision and ideals. Luckily for the nation, he was able to convince the citizens to go along with his efforts. Meacham took me on the journey with Jefferson in a very readable style.KIRKUS REVIEWA Pulitzer Prize?winning biographer lauds the political genius of Thomas Jefferson.As a citizen, Jefferson became a central leader in America's rebellion against the world's greatest empire. As a diplomat, he mentored a similar revolution in France. As president, he doubled the size of the United States without firing a shot and established a political dynasty that stretched over four decades. These achievements and many more, Time contributing editor Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, 2008, etc.) smoothly argues, would have been impossible if the endlessly complicated Jefferson were merely the dreamy, impractical philosopher king his detractors imagined. His portrait of our most enigmatic president intentionally highlights career episodes that illustrate Jefferson's penchant for balancing competing interests and for compromises that, nevertheless, advanced his own political goals. Born to the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson effectively disguised his drive for control, charming foes and enlisting allies to conduct battles on his behalf. As he accumulated power, he exercised it ruthlessly, often deviating from the ideals of limited government he had previously¥and eternallyÂ¥articulated. Stronger than any commitment to abstract principle, the impulse for pragmatic political maneuvering, Meacham insists, always predominated. With an insatiable hunger for information, a talent for improvisation and a desire for greatness, Jefferson coolly calculated political realitiesÂ¥see his midlife abandonment of any effort to abolish slaveryÂ¥and, more frequently than not, emerged from struggles with opponents routed and his own authority enhanced. Through his thinking and writing, we've long appreciated Jefferson's lifelong devotion to ?the survival and success of democratic republicanism in America,? but Meacham's treatment reminds us of the flesh-and-blood politician, the man of action who masterfully bent the real world in the direction of his ideals.An outstanding biography that reveals an overlooked steeliness at Jefferson's core that accounts for so much of his political success.… (meer)
 
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derailer | 74 andere besprekingen | Jan 25, 2024 |

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Statistieken

Werken
35
Ook door
5
Leden
12,169
Populariteit
#1,928
Waardering
3.9
Besprekingen
283
ISBNs
123
Talen
2
Favoriet
8

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