A new Lincoln book, The Broken Constitution

[David Lockmiller]

In the New York Times today, the following was one of the "9 New Books We (the New York Times) Recommend This Week." The recommendation reads in its entirety:

THE BROKEN CONSTITUTION: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, by Noah Feldman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Abraham Lincoln, Feldman contends, embraced a new, “moral Constitution” by purging the country’s original sin of slavery and re-establishing the nation on a more noble foundation. A professor at Harvard Law School, Feldman is “a lucid, provocative stylist” as well as “a prolific scholar and commentator on current affairs … well equipped to assess Lincoln’s constitutional record,” Sean Wilentz writes in his review. “‘The Broken Constitution’ displays its author’s usual brilliance and boldness in his contrarianism, and a passionate engagement with the past.”

What the NYTimes recommendation today left out was the very next sentence that Sean Wilentz actually wrote in his New York Times book review regarding Professor Feldman's book: "What it lacks is historical soundness."

I wonder if that was a purposeful mistake.