We all learned in school, for example, about Abraham Lincoln’s youth—the poverty and the ambition and the sense of responsibility he had as a frontier boy. The history books imply that our greatest president was shaped by his childhood. But that childhood produced a young adult who was unremarkable—a man who did this and that, and had a difficult marriage, a mediocre term in Congress, and terrible bouts of what today would be diagnosed as depression. It was not from boyhood but from a profound transition in his thirties that this man stepped forth into history. It was only then that he
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