A new book on our country’s sixteenth president published by NewSouth Books has earned high marks from the Louisville Courier-Journal‘s Linda Elisabeth Beattie. In her review of Wade Hall’s An Interview with Abraham Lincoln, Beattie notes that the book “captures Lincoln’s essence in succinct, entertaining and often moving prose.”

A mixture of imagination and fact, Hall’s book utilizes a fictional interviewer to examine President Lincoln’s views on slavery, war, and life, with Lincoln’s words all coming from the historical record. Beattie’s review praises Hall for knowing “that the best biographers write from the facts to reveal the truth” and that “the facts inform, rather than replicate, reality.”

Beattie calls Interview, though slight in size, “significant and frequently eloquent.” The review concludes, “In just 88 pages, Hall captures the complexity of Lincoln’s competitive, compassionate nature in a smart, sensitive scenario that would make his subject proud.”

Alabama native Wade Hall is professor emeritus of English at Bellarmine College in Kentucky. Among his other books and plays from NewSouth is Conecuh People, an intimate collection of oral history interviews that captures the lives of the people of Bullock County, Alabama, once the backbone of the rural South. A scholar of Southern literature and history, Hall is a frequent presenter on the life of Lincoln. He is giving a number of talks around the South related to An Interview with Abraham Lincoln, and is available to speak in connection with next year’s centennial anniversary of the commencement of the Civil War.

An Interview with Abraham Lincoln is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite retail or online bookseller.