Book Reviews
Team of Rivals Summary and Review
★★★★★ 4.7/5 — A Pulitzer-caliber case study in emotional intelligence as leadership strategy, showing Lincoln turning his fiercest political enemies into his…
Read Summary →Doris Kearns Goodwin
"The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who showed how Lincoln turned his fiercest rivals into his most loyal allies."
Doris Kearns Goodwin is an American presidential historian who earned her PhD from Harvard and served as a White House Fellow under Lyndon B. Johnson before becoming one of the country's leading biographers of the presidency. She won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995 for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Her other major works include Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, and Leadership: In Turbulent Times, which compares the leadership styles of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. Team of Rivals was adapted into Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln, and President Obama has cited it as an influence while forming his own cabinet.
1 book featured·Pulitzer Prize for History (1995)
Books by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Key Ideas & Recurring Themes
Hire your strongest rivals, not your safest allies
In "Team of Rivals," Goodwin shows how Lincoln filled his cabinet with the three men who beat him for the 1860 nomination, arguing his emotional intelligence and lack of grudges let him turn open rivals into his most effective advisors.
Notable Quotes
"An extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires."— Team of Rivals
Book Author Doris Kearns Goodwin
Team of Rivals Summary and Review
★★★★★ 4.7/5 — A Pulitzer-caliber case study in emotional intelligence as leadership strategy, showing Lincoln turning his fiercest political enemies into his most effective cabinet. Best for: leaders who want a deep, textured historical case rather than a numbered framework…