Phillip Paludan's review on Amazon.com:

This review was posted by Professor Paludan on the Amazon.com website for DiLorenzo's book, and appears here with his permission. Some very slight editorial changes have been made for clarity.

The first thing you notice about this book is that no historian with any reputation in Civil War or Lincoln studies says one good thing about it. That may recommend it to conspiracy theorists who won't read anything that challenges their views. But those seeking a sensible judgment and/or those who have read much in the honest literature of the era will find this book dishonest as well as poorly researched. DeLorenzo has recently said on C-Span that works by Mark Grimsley on Sherman's march and Mark Neely on civil liberties support his views. He could not be more wrong as readers of those books will tell you. In fact they refute his rant with overwhelming evidence. What he has done is to find and quote authors who wrote in an era where racism dominated Civil War scholarship and southern-born authors wrote to prove that their ancestors could not be fighting for slavery (despite the fact that the President and Vice President of the Confederacy and the commissioners sent from the Deep South to persuade northern southern states to secede all said that's what they were fighting for when the war began). What is so sadly revealing about DeLorenzo's book is how many people leap to defend it who have not read David Donald, James McPherson, Herman Belz, Harry Jaffa, Allen Geulzo (who dedicated his fine Lincoln book to Jack Kemp), Mark Neely, Douglas Wilson, Rodney Davis, Kenneth Winkle, Gary Wills, Brian Dirck or anything written in the last 20 years and published by a reputable press on Lincoln. I've been publishing and writing about Lincoln for about 35 years now. My books have won prizes from committees of scholars, including the Lincoln Prize. No scholar that I have learned to respect in over three decades would give this book even one star. I regret Amazon doesn't have a choice of minus points meaning "subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge."