Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln Book

Stauffer's book sets out to offer a dual biography of two of America's great public figures, but the book fails to tell the story of either life particularly well. Douglass is presented as by far the more forward-looking of the pair, as Lincoln only bends toward Douglass's views with the passage of time and through political expediency (though their friendship continues in earnest despite Lincoln's reservations). The intellectual history of the self-made man is a leitmotif of the book, but serious flaws in character development mar Stauffer's approach. The author takes the somewhat ludicrous possibility of Lincoln's homosexuality and runs with it, even going so far as to declare that we should hope Lincoln's mind at the altar turned back to Joshua Speed, who had taught Lincoln the meaning of love. Douglass, despite a description of his extramarital affair, escapes this sort of nonsense. The Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's opportunity to reaffirm and redefine the war, is found nowhere in the book - an inexcusable omission in a work dressed in the pretense of biography. Though Stauffer has acquitted himself with lukewarm success as a Douglass historian elsewhere, this book generally does not pass muster on many key issues, relegating it hopefully to the ignominious backwaters of Lincoln historiography.