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[W]hat a tour de force...! How close Mr. Vidal has managed to stick to the actual historical record.... [y]et for all this documentary authenticity, how alive and immediate everything seems! What a clever piece of machinery is Mr. Vidal's complicated plot! By setting the present- tense of his story in the 1830's and having Aaron Burr recall in his lively old age his memories of the Revolutionary War, the early history of the Republic, and his famous contests with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson (as if these mythic events had happened only yesterday)—what a telescoping of the legendary past Mr. Vidal achieves, and what leverage it gives him to tear that past to tatters.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times


A tragedy, a comedy, a vibrant, leg-kicking life. . . . All of this and much, much more is told in a highly engaging book that teems with bon mots, aphorisms and ironic comments on the political process. . . . Enlightening, fresh and fun.
Boston Globe


A novel of Stendhalian proportions.... It is probably impossible to be an American and not be fascinated and impressed by Vidal's telescoping of our early history.... Always absorbing.
The New Yorker


The novel is masterfully constructed, right down to a shocking but logical surprise on the last page. ... The familiar figures and stock scenes when we encounter them here are fresh, new, and utterly absorbing. Vidal has made a century and a half seem but a heartbeat from today.
Library Journal