It’s another book on Abraham Lincoln, but this one, “His Greatest Speeches,” is for “a slow reader,” says its author, Diana Schaub, a professor at Loyola University, Maryland. In fact, she is the slow reader—on a mission to get normal, hasty readers to see the marvelous exactness of Lincoln’s prose. His words were meant not merely to convey truth but also to move the reader to action: thus the right amount of truth to inspire the correct action. With that double need there is little room for error, yet much to explain. So go slow with cautious intrepidity.
