2017 Lincoln Prize

[David Lockmiller]

I just received an email from the New York Times:

10 New Books the New York Times Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
The list of ten includes the following three books.


LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, by George Saunders. (Random House, $28.) In this first novel by a master of the short story, Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his son Willie in February 1862, and is surrounded by ghosts in purgatory. Our critic Michiko Kakutani said the ghosts’ voices “lend the story a choral dimension that turns Lincoln’s personal grief into a meditation on the losses suffered by the nation during the Civil War, and the more universal heartbreak that is part of the human condition.”

SIX ENCOUNTERS WITH LINCOLN: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor. (Viking, $35.) Pryor’s account of the president’s meetings with ordinary Americans, recorded by their participants, illuminates Lincoln’s thoughts on various issues and raises startlingly relevant questions.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The Lion Who Wrote History, by Walter Dean Myers. Illustrated by Floyd Cooper. (Harper/HarperCollins, $17.99; ages 5 to 9.) A magisterial glow pervades Myers’s posthumous biography, which shows how important reading was to Douglass.


I don’t know if either or both of the two winners of Lincoln Prize for 2017 announced this week ever made such a New York Times book recommendation list.

James B. Conroy, author of Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime (Rowman and Littlefield)

Douglas R. Egerton, author of Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (Basic Books)