After a few hours of listening, one is completely able to determine the speaker, merely by the consistency of Gardner's voice work. Narrator Grover Gardner handles the richness of characters brilliantly by modulating this voice according to who is speaking at any given point in the book. Vidal's masterful treatment of this turning point in our nation is part lyrical imagination of how Lincoln thought and spoke, part historical context of emancipation, and part psychological expose of all the players of the time. With meticulous detail, vivid imagination, and a eye towards the nuance of historical context, Vidal's Lincoln is a thick stew of storytelling that savors from the inauguration until our 12th President's final days in a way that simultaneously captures the highbrow dynamics of running the US executive branch (complete with the tensions of alternative points of view) and the underbelly of pro-slavery factions from the South. The genius and berth of Gore Vidal's knowledge is on full display with Lincoln.

Vidal’s portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee’s armies beat at the gates. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation.

The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal’s fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr 1876 Washington, D.C.

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