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About The Greatest Speech, Ever
Product Description Former Sen. Howard Baker aptly descibes the book in his Foreword:"The Greatest Speech, Ever was written to be more than a specialized monograph about the Gettysburg Address. The author, Judge James L. Cotton Jr. digressed along the way into side excursions and back roads of Abraham Lincoln s remarkable life, exploring his hardscrabble childhood, and his courageous but controversial Emancipation Proclamation. To fully understand how the Gettysburg Address came to be, one must understand how Abraham Lincoln came to be. Part of the greatness of the Gettysburg Address is that the DNA of Lincoln s life is found in every word. Judge Cotton s extensive research into Lincoln s life located that literary DNA and brings the full display to the public in this remarkable book of the fascinating life of the greatest American president and the greatest speech, ever.Judge Cotton s book is not only a fascinating and scholarly assessment of the Gettysburg Address and its impact on America, but also an absorbing look into Abraham Lincoln s life. Review Judge Cotton s book is not only a fascinating and scholarly assessment of the Gettysburg Address and its impact on America, but also an absorbing look into Abraham Lincoln s life. --Former Senator Howard H. Baker,Jr., Chief of Staff President Ronald Reagan I m impressed, to say the least. I ve known Scott County Sessions Court Judge James L. Jamie Cotton, Jr., since he was a little kid, running around with my younger brothers at school, church and scouting, but I ve learned more about him over a three and a half day period than I ever did before. That s the span during which I found the time to read his latest book, "The Greatest Speech, Ever" from cover to cover. Needless to say, I learned a lot about The Gettysburg Address, details about the life of President Abraham Lincoln that I never knew, and about how true the age-old adage you can t tell a book by its cover really is. But by finding the time to read his book straight through, I also came to admire the man who wrote it, knowing how long he must have labored in his research, how dedicated he must have been to finish his project, and how much he was able to hone his remarkable storytelling ability in the process. The book is a scholarly work, but it reads like a novel . . . and that s a novel approach to the biographical genre in this day and time. I ve read numerous books and essays on the life of Abraham Lincoln through the years, but none as entertaining, insightful and poignant as The Greatest Speech, Ever. I admit that I m probably more than a little prejudice having known the author for most of his life, but I also have a background in the love of history, particularly in the Civil War era, and still spend whatever free time I can find in absorbing more about that crucial period in America s history. Still, I m impressed. While his book has as its focal point the 272-word speech that took less than three minutes to deliver just over 150 years ago, The Greatest Speech, Ever is also the story of an uncommon man being in the right place at the right time in American history. And intertwined with that story, are numerous detailed vignettes of both common and prominent individuals surrounding Lincoln who most historians tend to ignore, or mention only in passing. It s obvious that Cotton is enamored by Lincoln (as are most Americans), but he also takes an objective view of his subject by pointing out his little known mistakes, faults and failures in contrast with his remarkable achievements in overcoming his humble beginnings in his rise to greatness. In other words, he humanizes an American icon. This approach to writing history allows his readers to better understand Lincoln as he was in his own time and place in the nineteenth century, rather than in stark comparison to our life in the twenty-first century. Of the tens of thousands of volumes written about Lincoln over the last 150 years, a good percentage of
