Lincoln-Douglas Debate audiobook: civics, history and rhetoric lesson in 16 hours

(boingboing) - I've spent the past week listening to BBC America's 16-hour dramatic reading of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, America's most mythologized political discourse. I've been reading about the Debates since I was a teenager reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (he holds them up as a substantive counterpoint to the soundbite-heavy, content-lite Reagan-Dukakis debates), but I'd never actually read them.
I'm glad I did.
Not because the Lincoln-Douglas debates live up to the myth (they don't -- and probably nothing could) but because of all the flaws and human foibles they disclose about these two towering orators out of America's past. Continued