Lincoln (Vidal)

Book Reviews
Though Lincoln: A Novel is an obsessively political work, covering in exhaustive detail the bumpy course of the Civil War as viewed from the White House, its narrative pace is slow and leisurely; multitiered rather than sweeping, it accommodates a variety of characters in orbit about the President, or, like young David Herold (a potential co-conspirator of John Wilkes Booth), stationed across the street from him, in a pharmacy. Since it is the author's strategy to keep Lincoln mysterious and secretive, we are never privy to his thoughts, as we were to Aaron Burr's; but, by degrees, we come to know him well through the eyes of his witnesses."
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review

A portrait of America's great president that is at once intimate and public, stark and complex, and that will become for future generations the living Lincoln, the definitive Lincoln.... Richly entertaining...history lessons with the blood still hot.
Washington Post

Lincoln is in Vidal's version at once more complex, mysterious and enigmatic, more implacably courageous and, finally, more tragic than the conventional images, the marble man of the memorial. He is honored in the book.
Chicago Tribune

Vidal's book is a potpourri of his own inventions and bits and pieces he has picked up from other authors—bits and pieces mostly long discredited.... At many points it is hard to know whether his version of Lincoln's life and times is an outright invention, a dubious interpretation, or simply a mistake. He is wrong on big as well as little matters. He grossly distort's Lincoln's character and role in history by picturing him as ignorant of economics, disregardful of the Constitution, and unconcerned with the rights of blacks.... Vidal has created an oversimplified and fragmentary character, while the nonfiction writers come much closer to depicting him as he really was, in all the complexities and ambiguities of his life and times. Readers who want to know the real Abraham Lincoln (as well as he can be known from a single volume) will turn to the biography by Benjamin P. Thomas or the one by Stephen B. Oates. Readers who prefer the fantasizings of a fictionist will continue to pick up Vidal's book. They are welcome to it.
Richard N. Current, historian - New York Review of Books