Doris Kearns Goodwin

Thanks to president-elect Barack Obama, most of America is going to spend Thanksgiving reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s often-mentioned book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genuis of Abraham Lincoln.

I’ve already received mine via Amazon and am very excited to start especially because of all the hype that’s been surrounding this non-fiction historical book, mostly from comparisons to Obama’s Cabinet selections.

But who is Doris Kearns Goodwin? The name sounded vaguely familiar, as if I had heard of it before its recent rise to popularity, and I decided to do some research.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is an American author, historian, and sometimes political commenter. She’s written several biographies on past Presidents and won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1995 among many other prestigious awards.

The reason she sounded familiar was because of an article in the Los Angeles Times several years ago; Goodwin had been accused with plagiarism for her work, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Homefront During World War II.

The MLA handbook however, excuses this plagiarism as “unintential” and Goodwin has fought to prove her innocence and I’m sure mistakes can be allowed for the huge amounts of research and reading that goes into her works.

Whatever the past circumstances, the situations of the present indicate that anyone interested in American politics should definitely read Team of Rivals and I look forward to share my thoughts on it right here at the714club!

You can also check out her website here.

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