Book reviews: ‘Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln’ and ‘A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides’

‘Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln’ by Matthew Pinsker

When he was elected president in 1860, “Abraham Lincoln was not the inexperienced politician that history and myth have suggested,” said Caroline E. Janney in The Washington Post. In Matthew Pinsker’s compelling new book, America’s 16th president comes across as a man who dedicated most of his working life to political-party-building. Though he’d held no elected office since 1849, when he’d kept his promise to leave Congress after a single term, Lincoln never ceased networking, exercised power throughout the intervening decade as a lawyer and lobbyist, and by 1853, when a town was named after him, was the most prominent Whig in Illinois. Whigs were outnumbered, however, and the party was soon torn apart by the issue of slavery. By 1856, Lincoln was pouring his energy into the Republican cause, and when the new party tapped him as their standard bearer, “no one should have been surprised.”

“Pinsker drives homes what a mover and shaker Lincoln was,” said Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times. “A driven, scheming political animal,” he deluged constituents with promotional material, glad-handed both allies and foes, and at times used deceit and manipulation to manage party factions. “We’re reminded the past isn’t a playpen: They weren’t handing out presidencies to whatever Bible-quoting yahoo showed up and asked.” And while Pinsker can go too deep into the weeds, spending 20 pages on Lincoln’s failed 1849 effort to secure a sub-Cabinet federal post, “Boss Lincoln is history at its most fresh, real, and relevant,” showing us that even the great unifiers of bygone times had to scrap to push this country in the right direction.

“It is hard to imagine that the year will bring forth a Lincoln book of more originality or consequence,” said Harold Holzer in The Wall Street Journal. “Boss Lincoln is Team of Rivals on steroids,” focusing far more intently than Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 best seller did on the long game Lincoln played to achieve goals he cared more about than his own career. First his passion was infrastructure building, including railroads; later it was preventing the spread of slavery. Lincoln understood that those goals couldn’t be achieved without gathering power, and Pinsker’s “deep research, interpretive daring, and fine writing advance the case with panache.” Given that even the Gettysburg Address is analyzed here primarily for its political impact, “perhaps Pinsker grants Lincoln too little credit for inspiring voters with his soaring oratory.” Still, his book “fills a gap in the literature” and should inspire “lively discussion” among historians for years to come.

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‘A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides’ by Gisèle Pelicot

“A harrowing read,” Gisèle Pelicot’s searing new memoir is also “an unexpected testimony to the tricky nature of attachment,” said Helen Schulman in Air Mail. In 2020, the 67-year-old French retiree had been happily married for nearly 50 years when she was informed by police that her husband, Dominique, had over the past decade repeatedly drugged her into unconsciousness, raped her, and videotaped scores of other men raping her as well. She was devastated, of course. Yet in the early weeks and months that led to her husband’s globally watched trial, she didn’t instantly cast aside all happy memories of the life she’d shared with her abuser. A Hymn to Life thus “tells the story of how a woman held two opposing truths in her head in order to piece her shattered life back together.”

“I have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that A Hymn to Life is unique,” said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. Over four years, after all, Pelicot transformed herself from stunned victim to “a national, if not global, icon,” finding the courage to reveal her own name so that the criminal trial of Dominique and 50 other men would be extremely public. “Shame has to change sides,” as her book’s subtitle declares. To get to that point, she had to overcome her own shame about having suspected nothing and thus looking like an idiot. She also had to move past a deep-seated sense that, despite being a mother and a grandmother and having been the couple’s main breadwinner, being married was the primary source of her value.

“Pelicot’s honesty is breathtaking,” said Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic, “and it helps make A Hymn to Life all the more revelatory as a sociological document.” Her adult children were repulsed by and furious with their father as soon as his secrets emerged, but we can see that Pelicot’s love had blinded her and was too important for her to judge it empty. If she had since renounced all men, “that would be perfectly understandable,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Instead, at 73, she has moved in with a new boyfriend. “Love is not dead,” she writes.