Rating: 
Summary: Great History, Great Politics, Great Novel
Review: Andrew Delbanco says of this novel: "This novel will, I suspect, maintain a permanent place in American letters." I can only hope so; it certainly deserves it. The historical detail is perfect, yet never tedious, and with Vidal choosing which details to give us, we get the juiciest ones. This is a novel that will please history buffs, but it will also transform a reader into a history buff. (I found myself checking out biographies of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln from the library.)If there is anything negative to be said about this book, it is simply that it is very long (657 pages, and they make full use of each page). This should not deter anyone from reading it. It just means you should buy it for yourself for Christmas and read it over the break. Or take it to the beach. Though I imagine a cup of coffee or tea and a blanket are more suited for this novel. The Lincoln portrayed here is completely human, replete with humor, constipation, family quarrels, anxiety, wisdom--in short, a full and complex man. Scholars argue back and forth about whether Vidal has accurately portrayed Lincoln. This portrait is as accurate as any you'll find, but I promise you that no other will be this engaging and interesting. He even puts forth a believable theory about Lincoln's assassination (which he admits is largely conjecture in an afterword where he breaks down what parts of the novel are fictional and what parts factual). I recommend this book to every history buff, to every literature buff, to every American.
Rating:
Summary: Historic Fiction at its Best
Review: I am not a fan of Vidal's politics, lifestyle or world view but his historical studies are tops. This tale of Lincoln reminds one (strangely) of Safire in their fidelity to history. The characters in this book simply rise from the pages and stay with the reader long after the pages have turned and the book has been closed (the highest praise possible for a novel, by the way). We meet the 16th President who is presented as a multi-faceted man instead of the silent, stone-faced Chief Executive we have all become used to seeing. The political ins and outs - Gore's specialty - are not only clever but vibrant. There are many tales here - political, military, personal, family - and Vidal does a good job of combining them all into a highly entertaining work of art. As usual, it is the minor characters that make the book and this case is no exception. The less-notable politicos with all their scheming and planning emerge as wholly human and quite understandable. The book is longish but with writing like this it seemed like a novelette. This should be a welcome edition to everyone's library.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect portrait of an imperfect Lincoln.
Review: Lincoln arrives in Washington incognito in the middle of the night to avoid assassins. He is protected by Pinkerton. A little nobody, sympathetic at first because he is a boy growing up, becomes progressively less so as he enters the world of amateur conspiracies. Political foes Chase and Seward work in Lincoln's shadows. U.S. Grant appears briefly with his son. Much of the story accompanies John Hay, Lincoln's young personal secretary.
Hay's is possibly Vidal's most interesting portrait. In real life, John Hay started his political career as private secretary to Lincoln and ended it as Secretary of State to Theodore Roosevelt. He served three presidents assassinated in office: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. (I have not yet read Vidal's later American novels, but I presume John Hay reappears.) We see Hay move through Washington society balls, handle Mrs. Lincoln's scandalous purchases and indiscretions, or be heartbroken by Salmon Chase's daughter Kay.
The image of Lincoln Vidal presents is that of the knowing father, but not that of a saint. Vidal's Lincoln is never at a loss as to what needs to be done, but he can be unsure of how to do it. Vidal's Lincoln does have his faults. He is a racist. He is dead set against making slaves into American citizens and wants to ship them back to Africa. His priorities are crystal clear: if he could save the union by preserving slavery, he would. The myth of Lincoln the emancipator is shattered, and yet Lincoln emerges as a greater man for it. By presenting his true objective, saving the Union, Vidal shows us Lincoln's political skills and his compassion. He values the union more than he does the immediate abolition of slavery, but he recognizes that slavery is a blot on American history. He prefers African repatriation because he believes America would be a bad home for former slaves.
Vidal shows us Lincoln's civil war. Lincoln doesn't get to Gettysburg until November 1863. During the momentous battle of July, he was at the telegraph office waiting for the news. The novel starts with Lincoln arriving in Washington and ends at his assassination. Vidal's novel redefines Lincoln the man and dramatizes a historical reevaluation of Lincoln's role in American history.
Rating:
Summary: Brings Lincoln to Life
Review: The historian seeking to give life to his subjects, particularly those who lived before the 20th century, can often run into problems due to the lack of available source material. No man in American history has been more studied than the great AbrahamLincoln but how hard it is to bring him to life. The value of good historical fiction is its ability to make history both lively and interesting and to place it into the context of everyday life. Vidal's book is a great piece of literature. Brilliantly written it is also histirucally accurate. The book is essentially a character study of Lincoln from his inaugeration to his death four years later. Although a number of characters narrate the story through the omniscent device, Lincoln does not. With the exception of a historically verifed dream of his own death Lincoln had shortly before the assasination, the reader never enters Lincoln's mind. Instead he is viewed through a series of characters who surround him. His secretary John Hay, his wife Mary, his rival Salman Chase, his secretary of State William Seward and the traitor David Herold who was hanged for his part in the assasination conspiracy. Through their eyes Lincoln is presented as he was, a folksy deceptively simple mid-westerner who was shrewd, politically brilliant and deeply morose about the horrible work he was pledged to fullfill. Ultimately Lincoln is really unknowable and this is as it should be because this was his character. The narrative uses the natural ups and downs of the great struggle to present a story of great suspense and pathos. Anyone not familiar with the Civil War will learn much from this novel while being entertained. To me, a history buff, the single stand out moment that really shows where Lincoln was at comes after he is given word from General Meade about the results of the Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln, having heard that Lee was outnumbered and overextended had hoped that the rebel army could be destroyed once and for all. Lincoln received word from Meade that his forces had driven "the enemy from our sacred soil." Lincoln was in despair. After more than two years of war, his commanding General still did not even understand that ALL the soil of the United States was sacred soil, including the seceded states. More importantly, what hope was there of destroying the rebellion when the top General saw his job as driving Lee out of the North rather than invading and taking control of the South.? I highly recommend this book to everybody. We owe it to Lincoln's memory to understand him beyond the cliches.
Rating: 
Summary: A Little Far Fetched (And Intended To Be).
Review: This book is a very entertaining. Gore Vidal is an excellent author. However, this is not necessarily a good historical novel. It is quite long on conjecture and supposition, too much so. As a result, the history, the central topic that sells this book, is skewed, questionable. But that is quite alright. It is why Mr. Vidal titled it, Lincoln: A Novel. There is no reason not to enjoy this work, it is good. Just understand that Vidal's book is more good, novelist conjecture than solid, factual history. It is an interesting and fun read, one to be enjoyed.
Rating:
Summary: So Good!!
Review: This is a great piece of historical fiction by Gore Vidal, covering Lincoln's presidency, from the time he arrived in Washington on Feb 23, 1861 to his assasination by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. This book gives you a knew perspective on history because instead of being an omniscient narration, we see the action from the perspective of Secretary of State, William Seward, Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. We are introduced to the abolitionist politicians such as William Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens. And we see Lincoln emerge from all the doubts that people had about his capability to be president to become one of the towering figues in American history. In the final chapter, John Hay, one of Lincoln's former secretaries, says of Lincoln, after his death, "He was very sure of himself. From the beginning, he knew that he was the first man in the country, and that he was bound to get his way, if he lived" (pg 654). Hay is clearly a favorite of Vidal's and here is a reflection of Hay's as he stares at "The Ancient", as he thought of Lincoln, dead on the night of his assasination, "But then Hay realized that never again would the Ancient be reminded of a story. He had become what others would be reminded of" (pg 651). Gore is capable of writing beautifully, like in the two quotes above. And then there are Lincoln's own speeches such as the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. There is also the beautiful and young Kate Chase, daughter of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and the object of much desire among the young men of Washington, D.C. at the time. "A grand entertainment", as Harold Bloom wrote in his review of the novel for "The New York Review of Books".
Greg Feirman...
Rating: 
Summary: A Little Far Fetched (And Intended To Be).
Review: This is a very entertaining read. Gore Vidal is a very good novelist. But this is not necessarily a good historical novel. It is quite long on conjecture, too much so. As a result, the history, the central topic that sells this book, is skewed, questionable. This is no reason not to enjoy this work, it is good. Just understand that Vidal's book is much more good novelist conjecture than solid, factual history.
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: 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.
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