Anyone here read Gore Vidal's, "Lincoln"?

[Sequoia]

Did you like it very much?

I'm thinking of getting the pb copy instead of checking out the big hulking hardback at the library. Also, I'm still trying to plow through "Team of Rivals" which, even in pb form, is big and heavy.

[Smarmie Doofus]

1. I tried but failed.

I love Vidal's essays but I CANNOT relate to his imaginary dialogue. This is across the board: Empire, Lincoln, Burr... you name it.

I did make it through Julian. I liked that but that was written before Gore became "known" for his historical fiction.

In other words, it was less self-conciously "historical fiction". It breathed, while the later works simply reposed.

[valerief]

2. No, but I read Myra Breckinridge and Myron. I preferred Myron, I think. nt

[dhill926]

3. yes....

and yes.....love his acerbic and all too real take on history......

[Democracyinkind]

4. It's on my heap for the summer, can't wait.

But DKG's Team of rivals is one of the best main stream history books I have ever read.
Although I hear she's rather controversial, I liked the book, and I don't really get the dispute.

[Sequoia]

9. It's taking me a long time to read it.

It is very good and I'm nearly half-way through but I take breaks and read other books. I didn't hear about the contreversary though. It seems pretty straight forward to me. I thought it was funny when Seward went over to Europe for a few months being wined and dined by queens and kings and everyone thinking he had the cat in the bag. Sometimes I like Seward, other times I think he sets himself on a high horse. "I'm the REAL leader, see!"

Anyway....Fort Sumter....April 12.

[Democracyinkind]

10. I'm ambiguous on Seward. But Salmon P. Chase just doesn't seem right to me, too.

Somehow I was really torn between seeing them as a band of selfish jerks who play personal politics in the worst crisis ever, then again somehow they all pulled together now and then and that really made a difference then.
Unforgettable that we once had a VP named "Hannibal" ...

I should read it again soon. I get so angry at ol' Wilkes every time.

[Sequoia]

11. Chase was a stick in the mud.

No drinking, no nothing and he was really hard on his daughter. She's really interesting though. Seems she married a read jerk though. She was born a century too early. She would've fit right in the 1960s. That John Wilkes Booth....have you ever read "Manhunt...". That's a totally excellent book on the account of JBW getting hunted down.

[RoyGBiv]

13. She's accused of plagiarism ...

Well, more than accused ... some rather large bits of her work on the Kennedy family were clearly lifted straight out of other works, word for word. To make matters worse, rather than correct the mistake, she tried to pay off at least one of the authors of those other works and hide it. This is the kind of thing that gets you kicked out of school, but here she was a teacher getting away with it and winning all manner of awards.

The greater problem with her as a historian starts there and is derived from what came out of the investigation(s) into her work.

It appears she has other people do her writing at times, e.g. the research assistants who lifted pieces of other people's work in order to finish their piece of what they'd been assigned to do. Clearly using research assistants is not the problem. Most historians do. However, allowing those assistants to write for you *and* not check it yourself is a violation of a number of ethical codes and is intellectually dishonest. She still claims it all was a simple mistake of not checking the work and adding proper attributions, but that excuse actually points to the problem. If she'd been writing it all herself, would this issue have arisen?

And that leads to another problem that, before the plagiarism charge, was just a general criticism that applies to most "pop" historians.

She doesn't do anything original, she's poor at analysis, and she invents facts, specifically conversations. Of the later, in many of her books she has lengthy quotations from individuals that have no source. Indeed, many could have no source as she is *quoting* conversations that, if they took place, only took place between individuals with no witnesses and with no written record of the meetings. This is in particular a problem in the book that won her the Pulitzer, which puts a big black mark on the reputation of the Pulitzer committee, her publisher, her educational benefactors, and herself.

Even her synthesis works lack what good synthesis does -- explain why the synthesis is needed. What is missing from the various works on a subject that require this new volume or make it relevant? How is *this* work better than everything it is based on? This failing has led some in the academic community to question her commitment to scholarship in favor of profit for the sake of profit as well as to ask whether the reason for her lack of insight is related to the possibility that she's merely lifting her ideas wholesale from others.

Team of Rivals is a well written book, and it even has some originality in it with the focus on the wives of the cabinet members. Unfortunately, she fails utterly to provide a connective element between the wives and the cabinet and Lincoln. The thesis of the book is completely removed from that subject, and there appears to be no intellectual reason for their inclusion. If she wanted to do a story about the cabinet members' wives, she should have done that. (This would be original.) But, she didn't. She just threw some stuff about them in there without offering any insight into why it was important. The remainder is a synthesis of work on Lincoln and how he operated with his cabinet members. None of it is new or insightful. OnEdit: Correction: Much of it *is* insightful. But it was insightful the first 20 times it was done.

Her work is accessible and put together so that it makes a decent page turner. She's fun to read, and her books are interesting. Unfortunately, the interesting bits could very often be called into question for accuracy and why they matter.

[Sequoia]

15. Wow, thanks.

I sure hate that plagiarism. That should be the 8th Deadly Sin.

[RoyGBiv]

16. It's a hard thing to come back from ...

I'm willing to accept that she just screwed up and was not attempting to steal the work of others and claim it as her own. The incident that started the uproar was earlier in her career (late 80s), and some of it would have been appropriate quotation material that may well simply have slipped through the process of editing. I've written and edited stuff like this and know how easy that is to do. You're writing along at a smart clip, don't want to break the flow by dealing with footnotes, so you just put a marker in there and go back later. Someone either forgot the marker or ignored it during re-writes.

But when she went to the extent of backhandedly blaming her research assistants for it and trying to pay off one of the authors to keep the matter hidden, she lost me. She's the historian, the "doctor of philosophy," the person in charge. The buck stops with her, as they say.

By contrast, Ward Churchill has had plagiarism charges leveled at him, which initiated an investigation that has unraveled his entire career. He underwent a rigorous and damning review of his work, one section of which broke down a conclusion he drew about the meaning of legal policies toward Native Americans into tiny fragments and then reduced his argument(s) such that it could have passed no test unless he'd been able to cite a plain English law that stated "U.S. policy towards Indians is hereafter to be referred to as genocide." His conclusions were deemed intellectually dishonest because the authors of books he interpreted didn't like his interpretation and claimed he "falsified" and "fabricated" evidence to support his thesis. Goodwin makes up entire conversations and gets the Pulitzer.

Both plagiarism charges are legitimate. But one person, who seems to have plagiarized one paragraph in one paper he wrote long ago that has also been "excused" as a failure in editing, is now a goat, while the other, who plagiarized entire sections of books, is still a best selling author.

That kind of contrast is why some people don't like her on a personal level.

I'll shut up now.

[Sequoia]

17. Thanks. I recall Stephen Ambrose being accused of the same thing

when he wrote that book about the train tracks being laid out which met up in Provo, UT. And not to be cute, but I think Ward Chuchill was railroaded. Policies towards Native Americans was our genocide incident.

[Loki]

5. Read Vidal's Lincoln several times

each time, I found something that I had missed in the previous reading. You won't be disappointed.

[saltpoint]

6. It is outstanding. Actually, I like just about everything Vidal sends us,

and complain only that there aren't more books of his to read.

His interviews, over many years, are always very good and often tremendous.

Also quite good is JULIAN.

LINCOLN is a gem. I'd recommend it to anyone.

[Sequoia]

7. Saltpoint? Thanks.

Salt Point State Park is located on the rugged northern California coastline about ninety miles north of San Francisco on State Highway 1, nineteen miles north of Jenner. The shoreline within the 6,000-acre park features rocky promontories such as Salt Point which jut out into the Pacific Ocean. There are also a number of coves such as Gerstle Cove and Fisk Mill Cove in the lee of points. The park includes one of the first underwater parks in California. Fishing is permitted throughout the area with the exception of Gerstle Cove Marine Reserve, within which marine life is completely protected. The up-land portion of the park features both grassland and forest areas. The most popular activities at Salt Point State Park include camping, picnicking, photography, fishing, skin and SCUBA diving, as well as hiking and riding. Salt Point has a small visitors center which is open from April to November on week-ends and holidays. There are 109 walk-in camp spots.

[saltpoint]

14. - - - -

:hi:

[Jim__]

8. Read it a long time ago. Really liked it. -n/t

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. Yes, I've read Vidal's whole American history series

I suggest starting with Burr, which is about the Revolutionary War period. There's a fictional family that continues through all the books.

Vidal has an interesting take on American history. After the 2000 election, I especially appreciated 1876, which was the previous time the Republicans stole an election. I always thought someone should have made it into a movie.

Anyway, the American history series is in the following order: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, and Hollywood. There's also a book, Washington D.C., which is about the postwar period, but it was actually written before the rest.

[non sociopath skin]

19. Vidal later re-wrote "Washington D.C." to bring it into line ...

... with the rest of the sequence.

Love the novels and have read them all at least once. The history may be questionable sometimes, but Vidal has a superb sense of time and mood.

The Skin

[sueh]

18. I'm reading it now after buying it years ago at a library book sale.

A good read, I'm enjoying it quite a bit.