In the hazardous fictional terrain of his historical novels Gore Vidal is never especially kind to American history in general or to its icons in particular. Yet in this brilliantly realised study of Abraham Lincoln he paints a surprising & near-heroic picture of the man who led America through four of the most divisive & dangerous years of the nations history. Observed alternately by his loved ones his rivals & his future assassins Lincoln at first appears as an inept & naive backwoods lawyer. People in this novel are not averse to turning up getting drunk & regaling the reader with details of Lincolns whoring activities & his seemingly inexhaustible supply of folksy stories. Yet gradually Lincoln the towering leader of deep vision emerges in a Washington engulfed by fear greed & the horrors of the Civil War. Lincolns loving but mentally decomposing wife his view from the White House on slavery & Americas bloodiest war & his own fierce personal ambition: all are portrayed with a vibrancy & an urgency that almost belies what they have now become ? history itself.