". . .Abraham Lincoln's extraordinary rise from rural obscurity to become the greatest of American presidents has long been the stuff of romance and legend. But Lincoln's trajectory was in fact neither smooth nor inevitable, as historian Douglas L. Wilson demonstrates in this superb re-creation of the crucial years between 1831 and 1842, when the young Lincoln almost miraculously transformed himself from a small-town shopkeeper into “a man to be reckoned with.. . .”