Vidal brings to life the political differences between some of our founding fathers and the most famous duel ending Alexander Hamilton’s life, and demonizing Aaron Burr. Apparently, the boys just could not get along.

Освен като успешен военен по време на Американската война за независимост срещу Великобритания, успешен адвокат в новосъздадените САЩ, вицепрезидент през първия мандат на Томас Джеферсън, Арън Бър в известен най-вече с факта, че през 1804 г. убива на дуел друг виден американски военен и политик - Александър Хамилтън. Както и че Джеферсън се опитва да го унищожи политически с процес за национално предателство.

За съжаление, книгата на Гор Видал се оказа абсолютна скука и мъка за четене. Анализи и детайли липсват, очаква се читателят да има много добра, даже отлична подготовка по американска история. Много събития или изобщо не са споменати, или споменаването е бегло, като веднага се прескача към следващото не по-ясно очертано събитие. Ироничният поглед “отвътре” е свежа идея, но реализацията е много неудачна. Нито един мой въпрос не намери отговор, не извлякох никакво съществени познания или изводи за този интересен исторически период от началото на независимостта на САЩ. И войната, и покупката на Луизиана, и приемането на Конституцията на САЩ, и оформящия се обществен живот с теченията федерализъм-антифедерализъм си остават пълна мъгла. Самият Бър изобщо не е развит като образ, а сюжет в този (все пак) роман на практика липсва. А за прочутия дуел и причините му има не повече от един-два, и то неясни параграфа.

Донякъде интересни са оценките за други бащи-основатели като Вашингтон (описан като надут глупак без особени военни качества) и Джеферсън (представен като лицемер и страхливец без собствен гръбнак и дори без принципи, с което донякъде, но само донякъде съм съгласна). За самия Бър не научих нищо, въпреки остроумните видалови сентенции на доста места. Други важни участници като Адамс баща и син, Андрю Джаксън, Мартин ван Бурен и др. са само хаотично споменати.

Това определено не е роман, който да служи за запознаване с ранните години на американската демокрация и нейната еволюция. Подходящите читатели са единствено интелектуалци-граждани на САЩ, жадуващи за някой и друг остроумен дребен детайл.

1,5 звезди

I think this book actually took me 3 months to read. I thoroughly enjoyed the process...

If I think about it, if a writer can place me in 1782, or 1804, or even 1834, it's going to be...boring. By today's standards those were dull and uncomfortable times. And in the beginning, this book definitely puts you into those time periods. It does start to gain traction, and when it did it sent my mind flying like birdshot; too many directions! I often found myself on frequent stalled pauses, abandoning the chapters to look up individuals, court cases, events, etc. One can learn quite a bit about the factual history surrounding this fictional work. In fact I picked up several other books and articles related to the topic and read parts of them before I returned!

I found the book's jigsaw of historical facts well pieced together and Vidal's work remarkably articulate and fluid. I think the most revealing point within the book would be the politicking character of Thomas Jefferson. Often Jefferson is championed by some who believe that a latter day secession was not forbidden, or even clearly intended by way of some unanimous opinion among the framers of the constitution while some seem glued to quoting Jefferson's ideas of a separate American nation west of the Mississippi, and separate from the US. However, as Vidal highlights, it's not about what he said in 1803 so much as what he DID in 1806 in regards to that matter; He arrested he former vice president Aaron Burr for treason against the United States in suspicion for attempting to secede western states including Texas(US had a claim on portions of eastern Texas via the Louisiana Purchase prior to 1819), manufacture war with Spain(As well as the US allegedly), and conquer (parts of)Mexico.

The only event which never came to fruition in the years following Burr's trial would be the war with Spain, being that Spain left the continent 15 years after that trial, (and only 2 years after the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819) and regardless, many of Burr's contacts or younger associates eventually ended up following through. In this book we meet everyone from Winfield Scott to Davy Crockett. Also endlessly intriguing were the paths of the parties following the administrations of Washington and Adams. I could not get enough of the underhanded libel they leveled at each other that echos much the same in modern politics today.

I'm now obligated to read the memoirs of Aaron Burr, by Matt Davis.

Vidal had me hooked from the first paragraph right through to the end. Throughout the novel he not only, via Aaron Burr’s point of view, well defines a slew of colorful historical characters—Washington and Jefferson come off worse than you’d expect, Jackson better, Hamilton as one would predict—but also captures dawning Washington D.C. and, especially, New York City in the early 1800s as evocatively as I’ve read. From what I can suss, Burr, compared with subsequent volumes of Vidal’s Narratives of Empire series, is more faithful to history. That’s a definite plus with me, though I am looking forward to digging into Lincoln, in which Vidal, by all accounts, plays fast and loose with the facts.

Simply put, BURR is one of the finest historical novels it has been my pleasure to read. Gore Vidal made Aaron Burr, his life and times so vividly real to me that I could palpably perceive what he was like.

I started to re-read Lincoln, then Sarah pointed out that Burr is actually the first book in the American Chronicle series, and it makes sense to read them in order, so let's read this instead.

I didn't like this anywhere near as much as I liked Lincoln, but it's still enjoyable, and Burr's a great character. But that's part of the problem, he seemed the whole time a lot more like a character in a novel to me than an actual historical figure. The fictional first person narrator annoyed me a lot, and I think I got lost a few times with the non-linear plot. Also, I don't know anything about the Revolutionary War, nor about the early years of the United States, so maybe Lincoln was just more approachable to me because I knew more of the context? But, man, Vidal loves to use French phrases in this book, and there's nothing that pulls me out of a story more than a phrase I can't understand. But these are details that might just be annoying to me because everything is annoying to me.

But, yeah, three stars still. Even though I basically just did nothing but bitch about the book, I actually wish it had been longer. I could have used a little more information and context, and I felt like large sections were sort of left out. But maybe that's bc most of Burr's memoirs and notes were lost at sea. Glad to have read it, but also glad to move back on to Lincoln.

Did you know that George Washington lost most of his battles as a General...or that he had a big butt? These background asides make Vidal's "Burr" a fascinating read. Recommended!

A great read for rendering a satirical and jaundiced view of the Founding Fathers, with a focus on Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson. Vidal portrays Burr in third person from the perspective of an invented biographer interviewing his subject as an old man in the 1830's while inserting many long sections in first person from fictional memoirs. We get a nice account of Burr's role in Benedict Arnold's heroic Revolutionary War assault on Quebec City and fuel for a cynical vision of Washington as a poor general and crafty politician.

In his law career and political climb in New York State politics, he intersects a lot with Hamilton, whom he respects but slowly comes into conflict with along Federalist vs. Republican political lines. Burr's ability to harness the Tammany Hall political machine helps him almost win the Presidential election, ending up as Vice President with Jefferson. He detests Jefferson for his vanity and duplicity and for pretending to be anti-imperialist and humanistic while working on the one hand toward the goal of acquiring much of North America for the Republic and fathering many children with his female slaves.

The famous duel in which Burr kills Hamilton is not given much focus in this self serving account, although he makes sure to play up his courage in standing up to the smearing of his reputation in the aftermath.

The novel's coverage of Burr's involvement in a harebrained attempt to take Mexico away from Spain was fascinating. The scheme was stopped at an early stage by Jefferson, who believed it to be part of a larger treasonous plot to lead the western states to secede from the union (which ironically was a state's right in his anti-Federalist view). The trial of Burr and associates for treason was a nice high point of the book, as the interplay between Jefferson's prosecution and the Supreme Court Justice Marshall set many precedents about executive privilege and the independence of branches of the government.

Vidal breathes life into history by portraying a plausible version of dialog, thought, and motivation; that he goes 'over the top' and leans toward a cynical viewpoint does not detract from being entertained by his imagination and educated away from simplistic heroic views of our history.

The Revolutionary War officially ended in 1783. Revisionism and mythologizing about it began practically the next day. Some stories are so deeply embedded into our national subconsciousness that any attempt at telling a "true" version is likely to be met with utter disbelief if not derision.

Everyone believes they know the story of Aaron Burr. What they know basically are three things: one, he was Thomas Jefferson's first term vice president; two, while VP he challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel and killed him; and three he was put on trial for treason a few years later for a presumed plot to separate the western states from the union.

Virtually nothing else is popularly known about him. Which makes him, one would think, an ideal subject for new research and a second or third look. What is astonishing is that, with all the documentary evidence available, such a look has only recently been undertaken, most notably by historian Nancy Isenberg.

Basically, though, when it comes to received wisdom of the stories, things simply do not add up.

What Gore Vidal did in this novel (and he explains why a novel instead of a straightforward afterword which I recommend reading first) is to take things at face value based on the contemporary accounts available and applying a little logic to the history of this most interesting of the Founders to try to portray a "fair"
portrait.

The result is shocking, grounding, and immensely informative.

Of late (and I stress that this is nothing new) the reputations of the Founders have been locked in amber as if they were demigods. Treating them as human beings is simply not to be tolerated in certain circles. Well, you will find no demigods in this novel. What you will find is a fascinating portrayal of the early republic as it quite likely was---a place and time in which literally they were making it all up as they went along. In such circumstances, men of ambition and ego and newly-acquired power often act irresponsibly and good people (as well as bad) often get crushed in the midst of the contest.

Once the brilliant work of drafting the constitution was done, what remained were people bent on shaping the new country as they saw fit, and would often get very annoyed when they realized that the new framework they had just signed off on got in their way. Seeing this in play is the grist for this novel's mill. It is sobering and I would recommend it to any serious student of American history. Even if one disagrees with certain interpretations, it is a grounding work and would serve as anodyne against the glorious paeons to lost genius that comprise so much of "popular" American history.

Having read biographies of six of the Founding Fathers in the last year, including Ron Chernow's splendid Alexander Hamilton, there are a lot of recurring characters weaving through all their lives, as they all wove through each other's lives. It was a pretty small society; everyone knew each other.

One character who figures significantly throughout the early Republic is Aaron Burr.



The third Vice President, who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later accused of trying to take Mexico from Spain and create his own empire, tried for treason for allegedly planning to take part of the United States with him, a rascal and a rake who was the toast of Southerners who hated Hamilton, the toast of ladies throughout Europe, later remarried and then was divorced by a rich widow who was represented by one of Hamilton's sons, he has seemed in all the biographies I've read to be an interesting man.

But he's always described as more or less a villain. Whatever his charming qualities (he's often mentioned being genuinely beneficent towards poor ladies), very little else good is said about Aaron Burr. Ron Chernow calls him a murderer, and in describing his duel with Hamilton, goes over all the claims made by partisans on both sides but is clearly more sympathetic to Hamilton's version. Biographers of Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all describe a man who was a political weathercock, devoid of any genuine principals except self-interest. He switched between the Republicans and the Federalists whenever it was convenient, all with the ultimate goal of becoming president himself, and when that didn't work out, he tried to raise an army to take over Mexico.

I could not help wondering whether Aaron Burr was being portrayed fairly. After all, to have held so much influence for as long as he did (there was an electoral path that could easily have made him president instead of Jefferson, had things worked out just a little bit differently), he must have had friends. Surely Burr felt justified in his reasons for dueling Hamilton; they had once been friends. Did he just decide he wanted to murder a political rival out of spite?

There are biographies written of Burr, including some that appear to be sympathetic. He definitely has his defenders. Yet to get another view of the man, I ended up reading a work of historical fiction, by the late author Gore Vidal, whom I have never read before.

Burr is the first in a series of books Vidal wrote about the American empire. In the author's preface, he comes off as a little pretentious, and seems to think he invented the idea of historical fiction. But this novel was truly a fantastic experience, and Vidal absolutely researched the hell out of his subject. Every scene, from major historical events to minor anecdotes from the lives of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, I recognized from the biographies of those men.

The Aaron Burr that Vidal brings us in this book is a fictional character, yet it's a compelling and believable version of him. This Aaron Burr is wry, witty, and oh yes, he was always right and all the others, from Washington to Hamilton, were the real scoundrels, who constantly took advantage of Aaron Burr's good and principled nature.

This may not be the truth, and it may not even be how the real Burr would have told his own story. But let's say it's a version of the truth.

The device Vidal uses to tell Burr's story is the one fictional character he introduces: a young journalist named Charles Schuyler (not one of those Schuylers, as he has to tell people), who's hired to do a hit piece on the elderly former senator and vice president. The election of 1836 is looming, Martin Van Buren is the heir apparent, and the anti-Van Buren faction wants to torpedo his election by digging up evidence that long-whispered rumors of Van Buren being Aaron Burr's illegitimate son are true. (This, like all the other details in Vidal's novel, was based on historical fact: it really was a rumor that followed them around.) So young Charles Schuyler ingratiates himself with Aaron Burr, and ends up having his entire life history dictated to him, including the "real" story about everything from the Revolutionary War and Washington's generalship (terrible, according to Burr, and again, historians actually agree that Washington was pretty bad as a military strategist) to that fatal duel with Hamilton (in one of the few clearly fictional embellishments — or is it? — Vidal has Schuyler learn of Hamilton's real reason for challenging Hamilton to a duel, a reason that is plausible but, as far as I can tell, not actually mentioned in any historical records).

Along the way, Burr absolutely trashes every other Founding Father. His description of George Washington ("He had the hips, buttocks and bosom of a woman") is of a dullard whose stoic, presidential demeanor was a veneer over his greed and ego. According to Burr, they'd have captured Canada if Washington had listened to him.

Thomas Jefferson was a sleazy little sneak who considered the Constitution to be just words that meant whatever was convenient for him (more or less true, in my readings of biographies of Jefferson and others). Vidal's Burr gives a very believable version of Jefferson's double-dealing and selling out his own vice president, and later trying to have him convicted of treason over a plan that Jefferson himself supported. Again, it's a narrative that might not actually be true, but it fits the historical facts.

James Madison was a brilliant but sad little incel until Burr hooked him up with Dolly. (Again, a harsh version of the story, but not far from the truth.) James Monroe actually hated Washington, all the way back to serving under him during the war. (True? Monroe's biographers don't say this, but on the other hand, the men did have a break, Monroe was pissed at Washington over a lot of things, and we don't know for certain that Monroe ever actually liked him, so Burr's description of Monroe as constantly sneering at an oblivious Washington is, if not true, not unbelievable.)

In Burr, Aaron Burr is marvelously bitchy and cynical. As he takes down America's founding fathers while narrating his story to Charles Schuyler, Schuyler's own ambitions and unfortunate love life forms the only definitely made-up part of the novel (though even here, Vidal uses real people, like having Schuyler fall in love with a prostitute named Helen Jewett.)

I really enjoyed Burr. Gore Vidal wrote an Aaron Burr who is definitely the hero of his own story, and while it may or may not be true to the real Burr, it at least presents a believable version of the man who wasn't just Jefferson's foil and Hamilton's killer.

This was a pretty interesting book. Some people dont like it because it is written from Aaron Burr's point of view and he never misses a chance to speak badly about various founding Fathers. Jefferson Hamilton and Washington are his biggest targets. The problem is the author probably really did think all of those nasty thing about those guys so he was probably having a ball writing it. Gore Vidal was a big leftist. At the end of his life he and Christopher Hitchens had a hobby of writing bad things about each other. I think at the end of his Live Vidal was either mentally ill or had dementia because he was a really nasty man at the end of his life.

He is a very talented writer though and you can't take that away from him.

Unbelievable from start to finish! Aaron Burr, remembered in history primarily for killing Alexander Hamilton has a rich history that spans the revolutionary war all the through the Andrew Jackson presidency. All of these characters, especially Thomas Jefferson, are brought to light through Burr's perspective. Gore does an incredible job of separating his own politics and how he views these men, as he mentions in the afterward, from how Burr viewed them. This historical novel (not a biography) is a fun way to visit the past and is the reason the term "page turner" exists.