Team Of Rivals Summary

Robert Drake Dawson
Mr. Bhuiyan
U.S History 1
November 26th, 2015
Team of Rivals Book Review Team of Rivals was written by Doris Goodwin in 2005. Although it was written in the past decade, it steps into the world of Abraham Lincoln and political regime. It is an outstanding biography that was great to read.
This book is unlike any other book that Doris Goodwin has written. She takes an approach to Lincoln unlike that of any previous biographer. Rather than looking at smaller aspects of his career, Goodwin has opened up Lincoln's life. She shows us a president at the center of a vibrant political and social community. Goodwin, though, has included the women who made up part of Lincoln's world. Goodwin stays true to the facts about Lincoln's

Gienapp. Donald's Lincoln remains the definitive biography of the political Lincoln, while Gienapp's Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America is a highly readable short summary of Lincoln's political genius. But the brilliance of Team of Rivals is that Goodwin does not end her story simply by reiterating that Lincoln was a consummate politician. Indeed, all of the cabinet members Goodwin describes were consumed by politics. Seward loved political intrigue so completely that he could not bear to leave Washington, even to be with his wife. Chase wanted power to enact his own superior standards on the lesser beings around him. Bates loved his wife and family so deeply that he centered his identity at home and managed to walk away from power. Less driven than the others, Stanton wanted power to defend the

This helps to lend a sense that Team of Rivals is Goodwin's interpretation of life in Civil War Washington rather than a purely objective version of what happened. But so firmly has the author established her own historical skills, good sense, and authority in observing social interactions in the era of the Kennedys, the Johnsons, and the Roosevelts, that one can't help but conclude that Goodwin's version is the one to listen to. Indeed, a friend of mine confessed that his biggest argument with the book was that it ended; he found himself unwilling to let it go. I had a different reaction, putting this book down with a wish that, having found her way into the nineteenth century, Goodwin will stay. A first-rate book,Team of Rivals has proven Goodwin a first-rate historian of nineteenth-century