New perspectives, as claimed by this book's sub-title, are not to be found to any great extent in this collection of essays.

While not a bad book to purchase for a person who has not read much lately about Mr. Lincoln, I would suggest most readers will be better off buying one or more of the many new full biographies or book-length examinations of parts of this great man's life being published as a result of next year's 200th anniversary of his birth.

In this book I found the essays by Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz the strongest. David Blight's is just a rant against the modern Republican Party. Finally, Catherine Clinton authors one of the poorest examples of writing I have seen lately in any serious book. As an example, here is one sentence from her essay: "Lincoln's penchant for melancholy might have allowed him to sink into gloom, but apparently he reined in his emotions and forged ahead with legal work."

Although darkly troubled after reading Professor Clinton's essay, I reined in my deep gloom and forged ahead until I reached book's end.

As we approach the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, I suppose we can expect the already busy Lincoln book industry to go into hyperdrive. That necessarily means that a lot of stuff will get recycled and called "new." For the most part, this is what's happened with Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. There's very little that's new in these essays, although nearly all of them are well worth reading insofar as they offer convenient overviews of well-established theses.

Mark Neely, for example, who won a Pulitzer for his booklength treatment of Lincoln's troubled relationship with civil liberties, returns to the topic here. James Oakes, editor James Foner, and Manisha Sinha take a look at Lincoln and race. All three essays are good--particularly Oakes'--but none of them break new ground. Harold Holzer offers up yet another essay on visual images of Lincoln. James McPherson offers an essay culled from his newly-published (and quite good) book on Lincoln as commander in chief. Catherine Clinton and Richard Carwardine re-examine, respectively and rather conventionally, Lincoln's family relations and religion.

Again, these essays are all solidly researched, well-written, and interesting. But they hardly offer new perspectgives. Three essays in the collection, however, are especially noteworthy. Sean Wilentz really does, I think, break some new ground in his exploration of the influence of Jacksonian democracy on Lincoln the politician (a startling and therefore fascinating thesis). Andrew Delbanco's essay on Lincoln's rhetorical style--his "sacramental language" as Delbanco calls it--is also a genuine contribution. The third noteworthy essay in the collection is memorable for its odd out-of-placeness: David Blight's rather bizarre piece that begins, rightfully, by warning readers against Lincoln triumphalism (as represented, Blight thinks, by historians such as Guelzo) as well as Lincoln bashing (of the DiLorenzo variety), but then explodes in an angry anti-Bush W. polemic (with which I'm totally sympathetic, by the way, but find inappropriate here).

Three and a half stars. Stay tuned for scores more of "new perspectives" on Lincoln as we enter into the 200th year of his birth.