Gore Vidal wrote a masterpiece. A tremendous book about a tremendous man!

Amazing book. Lincoln as a political animal. The weak, minority president, surrounded by much more powerful political figures that, slowly drives all of them to obscurity and irrelevance while at the same time conducting one of the most cruel and violent wars in modern history. Only Vidal, born and raised inside the American political culture could give us this perspective on Lincoln. A great book, highly recommended.

Gore Vidal was a huge discovery for me. Until I'd read this book, I knew only that he was related to Jackie Kennedy Onassis and and Lee Radziwill and that he was a guest on many talk shows of the 70s & 80s where other well-known guests frequently found his opinions profoundly upsetting. But there was a lot of that going on at the time. I have always admired Abraham Lincoln as our most important president (except for brief periods when I was enamored of Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman and John Adams, in that order), so I literally checked out Lincoln by Gore Vidal. Apparently, the author read every "scrap" of information that he could find on his subject and then knitted together every true thing he found with what he could only surmise had taken place in between the facts by way of conversations which cannot be confirmed as having taken place. The book is as entertaining and enlightening a story as I have ever had the good fortune to read. I came away with a living portrait of Lincoln, the man, and was astonished to learn of the miriad of seemingly insurmountable circumstances attendant to the ones we commonly know of his life and times. Lincoln's health was not the best and the remedy for his stomach problems (a disgusting, viscous concotion called "Blue Mass") had to be endured often. His wife, though she loved him very much, was not an asset to him with her own frail mental and emotional states and some plain selfishness in the bargain. She embarrassed him publicly and politcially. They lost children together. I hate McClellan today because I read that he organized the Army of the Potomac, but he was a tragedy as a general, to put it mildly, and got a staggering amount of Union soldiers needlessly saughtered. Well, I loved the book. Will read it again.

That was a looong book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learned a lot about the man that I never would have guessed. I have to say the Hay was my favorite character and I found myself the most interested when the narration was coming from his mind. Mr. Vidal does an amazing job of painting the picture of each scene, especially D.C. and the White House, itself.

"Lincoln" é uma obra-prima!
Gore Vidal nesta obra monumental traz mais um contributo fundamental no seu magnífico trabalho de dar a conhecer a vida política dos EUA nos séculos XIX e XX.
É impressionante a informação que o autor nos proporciona do período entre a tomada de posse de Lincoln como presidente dos EUA e a sua morte.
Finalmente percebi a impressionante guerra civil americana - a Guerra da Secessão - uma guerra com um número de mortos assustador, e também neste livro se mostra com clareza quão intriguista e confuso é o mundo da política americana, quiçá explicando o que aconteceu na actualidade o que se passou com a eleição inesperada de Trump.
Gore Vidal é sem sombra de dúvida um enormíssimo escritor e este livro é imprescindível para quem gosta de biografias, de História e de política.

a chunk of a book that I found slow going at first because I was struggling to find the time to read but it warmed up as I got further in and I really enjoyed the political scheming and plots that surrounded Lincoln. A great insight into his wife Mary Todd Lincoln also.

Narrated by Gover Gardner, this novel follows historical events closely with what appears to be only minor deviations for the sake of drama.

Having listened to the book, I have a new appreciation for the speed at which this president aged. It is no wonder that he aged rapidly if events in the book were described with any accuracy. I also have an appreciation for the humanity and at the same time pure political subtlety with which this man lived and maintained his hold on events. Lincoln is nicknamed alternatively The Tycoon and The Ancient by his personal secretary and several other characters, whether sympathetic or conspiratorial. This is a story well-told.

Lincoln was underrated by those he conquered to become president, especially by Seward, who was his chief rival. The men Lincoln chose to rely on to help him run the country thought that they were running him and not vice versa. However, Lincoln turned out to be a crafty and devious man, perfectly capable of trapping his rivals in a relentless silken web of intrigue within sight of their peers. Chase, who Lincoln assigned as the Chief of the Treasury, thought he could oust Lincoln or at least control the puppet strings behind the scenes and certainly succeed Lincoln as the next president, as did Seward, Lincoln`s chief of staff, until Lincoln adroitly aired the inner workings of his cabinet to the senate, exposing their hidden agendas and drawing their fangs. Like Julius Caesar of ancient Roman times, Lincoln wanted to have opponents as well as supporters rather than sycophants in his cabinet so he could listen to as many sides of an issue as possible but there was a line that they crossed at their peril. Chase resigned at least 4 if not 5 times within his career when he had overplayed his hand, and Seward was cowed early in Lincoln`s first term.

Lincoln was less successful in managing the civil war with the South, giving command to the wrong generals for political rather than military reasons. Still, after some serious defeats, he learned to choose better commanders, settling on the apolitical Grant to resolve the close of the war.

Vidal described the ambition of David, an apothecary`s assistant, in much the same way as Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon: Both wanted to be famous for having killed a famous person. His description of Boothe, the assassin of Lincoln, was thoughtful and chilling.

It was sad to read that Lincoln and his wife had a rocky relationship. It was clear that they loved and respected one another. However, Mary`s uncontrollable spending and efforts to compensate and cover up placed her husband in real, political jeopardy. It seemed that she was mentally and emotionally unstable, and suffered not only horrendous headaches but also what might have been epilepsy in that some headaches preceded a period of frantic, irrational behavior accompanied by an aura followed by unconsciousness. Although I haven`t read it (yet), it would not surprise me if Mary went mad after Lincoln`s assassination. I loved Vidal`s description of her as The Hellcat.

It took a long time to listen to this book, but I enjoyed every minute.

I bought this for it's literary merits not realizing this is the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. This is an utterly fascinating read with sterling research to put you there in a pivotal part of American and North American history. The interspersing of fictional characters with the real life ones via cracker jack research that puts you in the muddy streets of Washington DC when the Capital building had no dome and Lincoln was sneaking into town as President elect because of death threats. A man from Chicago becomes President during a divisive time. Remind you of anyone?

A flattering blurb on the cover from Harold Bloom and one inside from Joyce Carol Oates certainly underlines this is a serious book; it's also an engaging and entertaining one, one that portrays the personalities and political machinations during the Civil War. Lincoln isn't just a celebrated American president, one considered one of the greatest in our history, he's still polarizing and controversial on both sides of the political divide. He's accused of trampling on rights from that of states to leave the union to individual rights such as due process of law. Vidal doesn't gloss over any of that. He depicts the Lincoln administration's suspension of habeas corpus, shutting down of opposing newspapers, institution of the draft and fiat money and Lincoln's scheme to remove freed slaves to a foreign colony. Vidal, though, does put all that ugliness in the context of the desperate struggle to hold the country together. His Lincoln is cunning, ambitious, driven, obsessed with holding the union together no matter what the personal or national cost and a master politician.

The book's first part conveys just how precarious things were for Lincoln and the nation from the initial days of secession when he as President-elect had to sneak into Washington, a capitol surrounded on all sides by slave states on the brink of joining the conflict. The second part takes us from just after the first battle of Bull Run through Lincoln's attempts to find a general who'll energetically prosecute the war, the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg. In the final Part Lincoln finds his general in Ulysses S. Grant and his destiny at Ford's Theater.

The story is told through various perspectives--though never Lincoln's. We mostly follow the perspectives of two cabinet level secretaries with presidential ambitions, the imperialist Seward and abolitionist Chase, and two young men with opposing loyalties, John Hay, one of Lincoln's personal secretaries, and David Herold, drawn into the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. I read this novel having recently read The Killer Angels, an excellent novelization of the Battle of Gettysburg. This made a wonderful compliment, giving me a view of the entire war centering upon Abraham Lincoln. Serious as the book is, it takes a satirical view at times of its characters (and a cynical view of politics), and one of the more humorous scenes is when Samuel Chase meets with job-seeking Walt Whitman. The book has an exuberance in the gossipy way it presents the various ambitious quirky personalities that keeps the story from being depressing despite the tragic events it treats, from national to personal. The picture of the troubled and troublesome First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, unstable from the beginning and further unhinged by her son's death, is particularly vivid and poignant. The novel is a fascinating portrait of a complex man and his presidency.

In lieu of a review, I will simply quote an anecdotal footnote from Christopher Hitchens' memoir, HITCH 22.

"I was once seated in a television studio with Newt Gingrich, waiting for the debate between us to get going, when the presenter made an off-air remark that was high disobliging to Gore [Vidal]. The former Republican Speaker abruptly became very prim and disapproving, and said that he would prefer not to listen to any abuse of the author of LINCOLN: a novel that he regarded as being above reproach. I conveyed this news to the author himself, who took the tribute as he takes all tributes: as being overdue and well deserved" (238).

For once, I agree with Newt.

This book reads like the a (uber pre-)prequel to Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Vidal recounts the Lincoln presidency with a good amount of fidelity to actual history and a knack for bringing out (or, where the facts are silent, fabricating) the tension between certain personalities and the drama inherent in that moment in history.

I was surprised that the novel covered only Lincoln’s time as President. It is, at least according to Vidal, very much factually-based, and seems so. Lincoln, for all his troubles, comes across as a likeable fellow, perhaps in over his head, but perhaps anyone would seem so while in the midst of the U.S. Civil War.