AOC Reveals the Book She’s About to Crack Open: “Boss Lincoln”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., discussed her summer reading plans in an interview with Meidas Touch reporter Pablo Manriquez, revealing she has been gifted a book about Abraham Lincoln’s political career before he became president.

Manriquez asked Ocasio-Cortez about her reading habits, telling her, “Reading and reading well, what have you been reading? You gotta do both. Do you have any book recommendations for summer?”

Ocasio-Cortez said she had recently been reading a book on a different subject before receiving her latest pick as a gift.

“I was reading a book on women’s physiology recently, that’s less exciting,” she said. “I was just gifted a book that I’m about to crack open called ‘Boss Lincoln.'”

The book, published in February 2026 by historian Matthew Pinsker, examines what Ocasio-Cortez called Lincoln’s “lost years.”

“Boss, about kind of the lost years, um, where Lincoln left office, and he was kind of building a political machine before he ran for the presidency,” she said. “So that’s, that was a book that I was gifted. And so I’m probably gonna crack that.”

The book focuses on Lincoln’s partisan skills in coalition building and party leadership during the 1840s and 1850s, as he rose through the Whig Party and later the early Republican Party.

Manriquez followed up, asking, “So you’re not committing to finish it, but you’re committing to starting it?”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s, we’ll see how long it takes,” Ocasio-Cortez replied.

Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s full interview below!