The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

In 1858, the two candidates for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, Republican Abraham Lincoln and incumbent Democrat Stephen Douglas, engaged in a series of three-hour debates across the state, talking mainly about slavery and territorial expansion. This audiobook is a word-for-word chronicle of those debates. David Strathairn (Lincoln) and Richard Dreyfuss (Douglas) do an excellent job acting out these historic meetings. They use their own voices, with no attempt to recreate nineteenth-century Midwestern accents, and they successfully mimic the speaking patterns and pacing unique to orators of that era. Lincoln and Douglas never formally engaged in conversations during their debates, but Strathairn and Dreyfuss reconstruct the passion and lively repartee that characterized their confrontations. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine