The great comeback

"In the winter of 1858-59, Abraham Lincoln looked to be anything but destined for greatness. Just shy of his fiftieth birthday, Lincoln was wallowing in the depths of despair following his loss to Stephen Douglas in the 1858 senatorial campaign and was taking stock of his life. In The Great Comeback, historian Gary Ecelbarger takes us on the road with Abraham Lincoln, from the last weeks of 1858 to his unlikely Republican presidential nomination in the middle of May 1860." "In tracing Lincoln's steps from city to city, from one public appearance to the next along the campaign trail, we see the future president shape and polish his public persona. Although he had accounted himself well in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the man from Springfield, Illinois, was nevertheless seen as the darkest of dark horses for the highest office in the land. Upon hearing Lincoln speak, one contemporary said, "Mr. Lincoln has an ungainly figure, but one loses sight of that, or rather the first impression disappears in the absorbed attention which the matter of the speech commands." The reader sees how this "ungainly figure" shrewdly spun his platform to crowds far and wide and, in doing so, became a public celebrity on par with any throughout the land."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.