Well, now that I’ve told you the title, you can guess the subject of the book. I’m not really a history buff, but after reading some glowing reviews on the publisher’s website ( which happens to be right here in Palisades) I decided to take it home to give it a shot. The book is by a General Sessions Judge in Tennessee, James L. Cotton, Jr., with a foreword by Former Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee. The events on 9/11 spurred his desire to try and determine how America came to be so hated by so many, when we were once viewed as the prime defender of freedom and equality. After hearing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address read at Ground Zero a year later, in 2012, he was struck by Lincoln’s words that seemed to be ” stretching out from 1863 to speak to today’s Americans – to all humanity.” And he was off and running, so to speak. Cotton also employs the use of flashbacks to convey details of Lincoln’s life, in a non-didactic manner.
Anyway, this post grew out of a question I had when I was cataloguing this title. I came across the term SAN on the verso page and didn’t know what it meant. I was going to blog about that, but I thought I had better look it up first, and found out it is a Standard Address number that pertains to the publisher. The full definition can be found here. This is one reason why I love being a librarian: not just the thrill of the search, but also the ability to learn something new every day in an engaging environment.