Reviews are in for "Lincoln's Greatest Speech", including this one from Max Byrd of The New York Times:
…in his exhaustive new study, ''Lincoln's Greatest Speech,'' Ronald C. White Jr., dean and professor of American religious history at San Francisco Theological Seminary, begins by trying to bring it to life. He describes in journalistic detail the inauguration itself on March 4, 1865, presenting the dramatis personae, the look of the new iron dome on the Capitol, even the weather -- rainy in the morning, with the sun breaking through the clouds just as Lincoln rose to speak. Then, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes word by word, for the rest of the book White proceeds to explain the meaning of the president's speech.
Gilbert Taylor of Booklist also gave this review:
Historian White has here turned in an acute analysis of the speech’s meanings in spite of the fact that the oration has no surrounding documentation about its composition. White breaks down the speech phrase by phrase, then integrates it according to its rhetorical framework of past, present, and future. He seeks sources for the speech’s ideas in Lincoln’s ambiguous stance toward organized religion, in the sermons of preachers he listened to, and in his Bible-reading habit.
