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This book has 6 recommendations

Bill Gates (CEO/Microsoft)

I loved Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and highly recommend this one too.

Barack Obama (Former USA President)

The Oval office can be a lonely place, so reading about your forefather’s experience could only help. “The biographies have been useful, because I do think that there’s a tendency, understandable, to think that whatever’s going on right now is uniquely disastrous or amazing or difficult,” said President Obama in an interview.

Benjamin Spall (Co-Author/My Morning Routine)

I'm currently reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin [...] I've been waiting to read [it] for years, and while I'm only fifty or so pages in I'm already loving it.

Brene Brown (Author & Researcher)

Ten years in the making, Goodwin’s book examines how Lincoln turned rivals into allies for the sake of the greater good. Goodwin argues that Lincoln’s ability to select and work with the best people was one of the key reasons he was able to lead the nation through one of its darkest periods.

Maya Zlatanova (Co-Founder & CEO/FindMeCure)

I personally motivate myself by biographies like the one of Lincoln.

Kobe Bryant (Basketball Player / LA Lakers)

I loved Team of Rivals, and Leadership really built on the things I had taken away from that book. Moving from basketball to building a company, I needed to learn new and different leadership skills, and Goodwin outlines the different skill-sets of Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and Lyndon Johnson, accessibly.

Amazon description

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.

Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.

It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.

We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.

This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.

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See more books recommended by

Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Benjamin Spall, Brene Brown, Maya Zlatanova, Kobe Bryant

See more books written by

Doris Kearns Goodwin

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