Lincoln

Rating:
Summary: SHAKESPEARIAN!
Review: This is perhaps the finest American historical novel I've ever read. Vidal takes the most familiar piece of our history and makes us view it anew, treating the Civil War as a political, rather than military event, never leaving the besieged capitol city. Lincoln is presented to us indirectly, through the eyes of loved ones and adversaries a like. By the novel's end, we feel we close to solving the mystery of this sphinx-like, enigmatic man.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant work of historical fiction
Review: This is simply the best book of historical fiction I have read - a brilliant work that is enthralling and utterly plausible.

I saw Gore Vidal's Lincoln on TV in the late 80s played by Sam Waterson and Mary Tyler Moore. At that time I remember thinking of it as a very interesting movie, but did not connect it to the American Chronicle series that Gore Vidal authored.

Reading this book, the TV movie comes better to light (and I am now quite urgently trying to dig it up!).

The book itself is characterized by several wonderful elements:
Firstly, Gore Vidal is a splendid writer. The way he scripts his words, the way he sets up the scenes and the psychological probing of his characters are all scintillating.

Secondly, the subject of this novel is so towering, that the reader can be forgiven for wondering if a novel can do him justice. Gore Vidal achieves that feat - he manages to present Lincoln foremost as a master politician, a leader for his times, a compassionate, wily, honest, determined and utterly human.

Finally, it is quite amazing how many of Lincoln's senior officers (Chase, Seward, McClellan) were gunning for his office. How Lincoln manages all these competing political forces is a compelling reading.

There is enough mythology sorrounding Lincoln, without having to have fiction written around him and circumstances of the civil war. But Gore Vidal's purpose is quite genuine and sincere - taking a fictional tack frees him up to probe Lincoln the man and all the characters and circumstances he had to deal with with much more freedom and creativity - the result is a plausible, yet utterly delightful account of America's arguably greatest President.

This book will be one my prized possesions on my bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: I WANT MORE VIDAL
Review: This isn't only a novel about the famous President; it's also about his Cabinet (particularly his Secretary of State and his Secretary of the Treasury), his generals, his family and his enemies. It is a portrait of a smart man with a lot of trouble in his hands. As I read I got curious about some of the characters, and I found a site in Internet (www.picturehistory.com ) which turned out to be of really useful. I ended up downloading the photos of 20 + characters mentioned in the book, but there are many more. After 650+ pages, I still wanted to know "what's gonna happen next". Four and a half stars.

Rating:
Summary: I wish I had read the book rather than listenin to the tape
Review: Very sketchy. I like Vidal's writing but the tape must have been edited with a meat cleaver. All that was on the tape seemed to be excerpts. Those were tantizing enough. But I couldn't recommend the tape version.

Rating:
Summary: An Engaging and Informational Read
Review: Vidal hit the nail on the head with this historically based piece of fiction. He took a terribly interesting time in history and added enough fictional story line to fill in the holes, creating an interesting book from cover-to-cover. Not only did Vidal provide a vivid picture of the world around Licoln, but he also provides a great accouting of what life was like during the period.

Rating:
Summary: A beautifully crafted novel
Review: Vidal is a prose stylist of uncommon power and grace. What stands out in this novel the most is his economical use of words. That is to say he is a master craftsman of sentences. He is a perfect storyteller. He keeps his reader interested and certainly never bored.

The story is told through Lincoln himself, his wife Mary Todd, William H. Seward the Secretary of State, Salmon P. Chase the secretary of the Treausury; David Herold, in his elder teenage years, a future conspirator of John Wilkes Booth; and William Sprague, the roguish and clownish millionaire Rhode Island governor cotton magnate whose arrival on the scene portends the coming tribulations of the Chase family. The prime perspective through which Vidal tells the story is probably John Hay, future secretary of state, one of Lincoln's two secretaries.

Another virtue of the story is Vidal's ability to paint a picture of Washington D.C. in the early 1860's. With his great gift for words, Vidal paints a picture of the town that the reader can almost literally see it in her mind, at least as it was seen by the almost exclusively privilleged characters in the book. It was a pretty tumultuous town, the capital of a nation beginning to undergo severe change and Vidal provides the reader a good feeling of the effects on the town of wartime. There are hordes of people swarming in the city for government jobs, soldiers, profiteers, and after a while discharged starving desperate Confederate POW's, a few of whom we meet at the end of the book joining John Wilkes Booth's conspiracy.

Lincoln is fairly well crafted, a very calm and quiet man. Vidal makes him into a likeable character but the reader is able to see through his cryptic personality, the effects of the severe trials and tribulations of the war on him. But Lincoln is also an immensely crafty politician, something his much more worldy rivals like William Seward find out too late. Seward assumes that he will manage the government at the outset of Lincoln's election and Lincoln simply be a figurehead but by 1863, Seward has been outmaneuvered subtly and has become one of Lincoln's lieutanents. Chase tries to take advantage of Lincoln too and is outmaneuvered likewise.

Vidal describes Lincoln as a fairly ruthless politician beneath his veneer. He suspended habeaus corpus and threw opponents of the civil war in prison by the thousands. He used the army to manipulate politics in the border slave states. His goal in fighting the civil war was to preserve the union; if he could have save the union by expanding slavery he would have done it. Vidal describes Lincoln's indignation at a general whose order he countermanded in the Summer of 1861 to free the slaves of rebels in the Missouri area. By the summer of 1862, he had become convinced of the military necessity of declaring free, slaves in states rebelling against the union. The result of this was the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln eventually became an advocate of abolishing slavery all together by 1864. He also put forth fervently the idea that as many American blacks as possible should be transported to colonize somewhere in Latin America or someplace far away from white Americans, in order to avoid racial warfare(so the excuse went). He was in favor of "compensating" slave owners for the loss of their slaves and only giving black union soldiers and the "most intelligent" the right to vote. In other words, the course that Andrew Johnson (the episode as described by Vidal, with his drunken speech after he was sworn in as vice president at the beginning of Lincoln's second term is amusing) would follow after the war before being defeated by the Radical Republicans in 1867.

Vidal makes constant use of subtle sardonic humor in describing the actions of his characters. But he also shows a great deal of intelligent compassion for them. As I say, he his never boring, evokes considerable color in the story. We see alot of John Hay, but don't get terribly deep into his character; he is more of a reporter for Vidal than anything but he is interesting nonetheless. David Herold is very real in his childish yearning to become a hero for the confederacy in spite of being stuck as clerk and delivery boy at a pharmacy and lies to his friends that he had something to do with a failed attempt to poison Lincoln. The pharmacy is frequented by the political elites for their medical needs. David is assigned mainly the duty of picking up what gossip he can from the customers of the pharmacy, but he dosen't get a whole lot.

Lincoln is portrayed compassionately but his and his colleagues' not exactly credible political intrigues are described vividly. Mary Todd is described vividly in her extremely capricious spending habits which she tries to hide from her husband and places her in a compromised position which causes some trouble for her husband. Mary Todd is followed through the death of her son Willie, the episode which Vidal describes with his usual skill, and to the end of the administration. She is afflicted with severe headaches which cause her bouts of insanity. I liked the scene at the front where Lincoln is off with the Generals and Mary Todd is slowly going into a bout of insanity. Here she rages at Ulysses S. Grant's wife and others and calls the wife of a general a "[prostitute]" and makes her burst into tears because the wife had been riding next to Lincoln and thus is perceived by Mary in her extreme paranoia to be trying to seduce the president. It is a pretty tragic scene but it is funny in its absurdity.

I must say I was particularly struck by the troubles that suddenly beset toward the end, Salmon Chase and his beautiful daughter Kate. They are shown to be well intentioned people but who are caught up in the terrible game of politics and privillege and thus are tragic figures. Chase's quest for the presidency ends in comic failure. The story of Kate's decline has a sort of air of Dostoyevksy.

Vidal says in his afterword that he did little inventing in this book, only for the most part, inventing David Herold's life before his joining Booth's conspiracy. Booth appears late in the book but Vidal does a good job in portraying him as the slightly unstable and decadent theater star that he was.

Rating:
Summary: Great insights to not the legend, but the man.
Review: Vidal uses the viewpoints of those around the great president to give the reader insights into the man behind the legend. These viewpoints come from his family, friends, and enemies to give a better impression of Lincoln than a history book could hope to achieve.

Rating:
Summary: Splendid reading
Review: Vidal writes a very entertaining novel based on the facts of Lincoln's life from his innaugaration to his murder. Particularly interesting is his portrait of Mary Todd - she is a fascinating, mad figure who both tormented and consoled Lincoln in his struggles. While it is a big novel, it is rarely difficult to read (except when it gets bogged down in some silly conversational one upmanship between the politicians at various social settings). I enjoyed it very much. Vidal has a very clear idea of what he wants to do and does it very well. A great way to spend several evenings. I had no interest in the civil war period when I picked this up but I was thoroughly entertained.

Rating:
Summary: A most vivid account of Lincoln as man and president
Review: Vidal's account of Lincoln's presidency paints a most vivid picture of a very uncommon man who rose to the challenge of his presidency. Lincoln, who many consider one if not the most important U.S. president, is shown with a genial mind, often deeply conflicted and uncertain, still humorous when faced with the political, strategic and moral trade offs. I found it a facinating book to read.

Rating:
Summary: A beautifully crafted historical novel
Review: What stands out in this novel the most is Vidal's economical use of words. That is to say he is a master craftsman of sentences. He is a prose stylist of uncommon power and grace He is a perfect storyteller; his reader is always interested and certainly never bored.

The story is told through Lincoln himself, his wife Mary Todd, William H. Seward the Secretary of State, Salmon P. Chase the secretary of the Treasury; David Herold, in his elder teenage years, a future conspirator of John Wilkes Booth; and William Sprague, the roguish and clownish millionaire Rhode Island governor cotton magnate whose arrival on the scene portends the coming tribulations of the Chase family. The prime perspective through which Vidal tells the story is probably John Hay, future secretary of state, one of Lincoln's two secretaries.

Another virtue of the story is Vidal's ability to paint a picture of Washington D.C. in the early 1860's, obviously completely urecognizeable 140 years later, a little glimpse of antebellum America before it disapeared. Vidal paints a picture of the town that the reader can almost literally see in her mind, at least as it was seen by the almost exclusively privileged characters in the book.

Lincoln is fairly well crafted, a very calm and quiet man. Vidal makes him into a likeable character but the reader is able to see through his cryptic personality, the effects of the extreme horrors of the war on him. But Lincoln is also an immensely crafty politician, despite his appearance of being merely a midwestern rube corporation lawyer who likes to tell dumb stories. Seward assumes that he will manage the government at the outset of Lincoln's election and Lincoln simply be a figurehead but by 1863, Seward has been outmaneuvered subtly and has become one of Lincoln's lieutenants. Chase tries to take advantage of Lincoln too and is outmaneuvered likewise.

Vidal describes Lincoln as a fairly ruthless politician beneath his veneer. He suspended habeas corpus and threw opponents of the civil war in prison by the thousands. He used the army to manipulate politics in the border slave states. His goal in fighting the civil war was to preserve the union; if he could have save the union by expanding slavery he would have done it. Vidal describes Lincoln's indignation at a general whose order he countermanded in the summer of 1861 to free the slaves of rebels in the Missouri area. By the summer of 1862, he had become convinced of the military necessity of declaring free, slaves in states rebelling against the union. The result of this was the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln eventually became an advocate of abolishing slavery all together by 1864. He also put forth fervently the idea that as many American blacks as possible should be transported to colonize somewhere in Latin America or someplace far away from white Americans, in order to avoid racial warfare(so the excuse went). He was in favor of "compensating" slave owners for the loss of their slaves and only giving black union soldiers and the "most intelligent" the right to vote. He advocated bringing back the Southern states into the union with no obligation other than for ten percent of the population of each of the states to swear allegiance to the Union. In other words, the course that Andrew Johnson (the episode as described by Vidal, with his drunken speech after he was sworn in as vice president at the beginning of Lincoln's second term is amusing) would follow after the war before being defeated by the Radical Republicans in 1867.

Vidal makes constant use of subtle sardonic humor in describing the actions of his characters. But he also shows a great deal of intelligent compassion for them. Lincoln is portrayed compassionately but his and his colleagues' not exactly creditable political intrigues are described vividly. We see a lot of John Hay, but don't get terribly deep into his character; he is more of a reporter for Vidal than anything but he is interesting nonetheless. David Herold is very real in his childish yearning to become a hero for the confederacy in spite of being stuck as clerk and delivery boy at a pharmacy and lies to his friends that he had something to do with a failed attempt to poison Lincoln.. David is assigned mainly the duty of picking up what gossip he can from the customers of the pharmacy, which is frequented by the political elite, but he doesn't get a whole lot.

Mary Todd is described vividly in her extremely capricious spending habits, which places her in a compromised position and her great hunger for social prestige. Mary Todd is followed through the death of her son Willie and to the end of the administration. She is afflicted with severe headaches, which cause her bouts of insanity. I liked the scene at the front where Lincoln is off with the Generals. Here Mary with an insanity bout/headache building inside her calls a General's wife a "whore" and makes her cry and Is very catty towards Ulysses S. Grant's wife and others. It is a pretty tragic scene but it is funny in its absurdity.

I must say I was particularly struck by the troubles that suddenly beset toward the end, Salmon Chase and his lovely daughter Kate. They are shown to be who are caught up in the terrible game of politics and privilege and thus are tragic figures. Chase's quest for the presidency ends in comic failure. The story of Kate's decline has a sort of air of Dostoyevksy.

Vidal says in his afterward that he did little inventing in this book for the most part. He did create a life for David Herold before his joining Booth's conspiracy. Booth appears late in the book but Vidal does a good job in portraying him as the slightly unstable and decadent theater star that he was.