Published to a flurry of praise--and consternation--from Lincoln scholars, Burlingame's book takes a hard and unsentimental look at, among other things, Abraham Lincoln's excruciating yet fruitful midlife crisis, his marriage to a dishonest woman who often embarrassed and sometimes physically abused him, his estrangement from his father, his explosive temper, and his aversion to women.
 

Michael Burlingame, a professor of history at Connecticut College, New London, is the editor of An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay's Interviews and Essays and Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, 1861-1865.