From Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Turf issues are critical for any writer with the temerity to take on the Lincoln story. There are so many Lincoln books that there is even a book wholly devoted to listing the Top 100 books on the subject.

The Lincoln chronicle is so long and complex that most writers choose some single area on which to concentrate. So there are books on Lincoln’s depression, on his Christianity, on his career in law, on his assassin and on his cabinet.

There are also books on the Lincoln family, starting with the peculiar character of Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s ambitious, unstable and hard-shopping wife. And now there is “The Lincolns,” Daniel Mark Epstein’s careful parsing of the Lincoln marriage.

Scholarly specificity demands that Mr. Epstein begin this book with the 1842 reunion of the lovers after a long, mysterious separation and then extend it from their impetuous wedding on Nov. 4, 1842 (“I want to get hitched tonight,” the future president told a parson that morning), to Lincoln’s murder on April 14, 1865.

Given this relative simplicity of focus Mr. Epstein might have extracted the story of the marriage from its larger historical context. But Lincoln scholars seem acutely aware of one another’s comprehensiveness…. So “The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage” is a longish but fascinating interweaving of the crisis-filled, mercurial career of Abraham Lincoln with an equally rocky tale of man and wife.

One of Mr. Epstein’s primary goals, it seems, is to break with convention when it comes to the story of the Lincolns’ stormy domesticity. He takes a more generous, warmblooded view of this union than most biographers do. He appreciates the early attraction between the two of them, the sustained intimacy that lasted long into their lives together and the fond, even frolicsome nature of their shared communication….

“The Lincolns” relies less on new information than on a thoughtful…examination of existing material. For instance Mr. Epstein surmises that the abrupt hiatus in the couple’s courtship reflected Lincoln’s fear that he had contracted syphilis, rather than ascribing this breakup to Lincoln’s doubtsabout his love for Mary Todd.If anything, according to this book, he loved her too much to marry her in 1840, not too little. She was described at that time, after all, as “the very creature of excitement” and “one who could make a bishop forget his prayers.”

There is even some novelty in Mr. Epstein’s willingness to write about Mary — or Molly, as her husband called her — as a mesmerizing creature rather than a harridan in the latter part of the marriage. Even after the Lincolns had been battered by the deaths of two sons and the immense public pressure of the presidency, he asserts, they were closely bound by Mary’s enduring (if sometimes troublemaking) involvement in her husband’s political career.

The three-dimensional quality of “The Lincolns” is all the more remarkable because firsthand material about the marriage is sparse. So not a letter between them goes unexamined here.

The tone of the correspondence can be surprising, particularly when Mr. Epstein emphasizes its discreet but distinct erotic charge….

Despite the impression that Mary Lincoln was a crazy spendthrift and that her husband was a model of probity, Mr. Epstein finds evidence of a shared conversational interest. (“Very soon after you went away,” he wrote her, also in 1848, “I got what I think a very pretty set of shirt-bosom studs — modest little ones, jet, set in gold, only costing 50 cents a piece, or $1.50 for the whole.”) And when “The Lincolns” dwells on such small matters, it integrates into a fully formed larger portrait. Mary’s mad escalation to the heedless purchasing of $1,000 shawls (at a time when that was the cost of a carriage) reflects the overall despair, frustration and combativeness that the weight of a wartime presidency inflicted on both adult Lincolns.

“The Lincolns” is valuable for its exacting evocation of the 19th-century household. (Cold water, the president’s favorite beverage, was something of a delicacy.) And when he reads much into Lincoln’s borrowing of books by Goethe from the Library of Congress as his son Willie lay dying and his wife’s influence peddling had damaged the presidency, Mr. Epstein does have reason to guess that Faust’s pact with the Devil may have been on Lincoln’s mind.

But his decision to zero in on the Lincolns’ life together proves a quirkily rewarding one. This book is written with insight fresh enough to penetrate some of the absurd solemnity that constitutes Lincoln lore. After all, upon the death of Willie Lincoln there was a reporter who, in Mr. Epstein’s words, “brightly commented,” “The embalmment was a complete success, and gave great satisfaction to all present.”

From Andrew Ferguson, The Wall Street Journal

Readers familiar with this literature…will approach The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage¸ by Daniel Mark Epstein, full of unease and ready to cringe; but they will come away lost in admiration at a masterly literary and historical performance. Mr. Epstein has re-created a picture of the Lincolns that is vivid, carefully researched and not at all cheeky or meddlesome. Perhaps most amazingly his account is plausible from start to finish.
           
Consensus is a changeable thing among historians, but about the union of Abraham and Mary they’ve agreed on a single constant: It was rocky. Witnesses recorded countless instances of marital strife, from spats and periods of icy estrangement to volcanic rages. Most historians have been happy to credit the stories, partly because there were so many of them but also because it was Mary who always seemed at fault. The Great Emancipator escaped blame. He was the sympathetic victim of a tempestuous and probably crazy woman….
           
The rise of academic feminism, however, has helped to rescue Mary from caricature. More recent scholarship notes her keen intellect and wide interests—she was much better read than Lincoln—along with her social grace and maternal devotion. A few historians have also taken to observing that, whatever Mary’s shortcomings, Abe was no day at the beach either. Riding the legal circuits through central Illinois, he routinely left his wife alone with a houseful of young children for three months at a time twice a year. He was moody and distracted, an ambitious workaholic given to long silences…
           
Mr. Epstein threads a middle path, writing with sympathy for both husband and wife. His account of the Lincolns’ marriage combines a poet’s sensitivity and imagination with a good historian’s rigor and fairness. He has in particular an eye for the shifting tides of status and the tensions they can create: He knows that the wooing of the well-born Mary by the rustic young lawyer Lincoln, no matter how impressive his prospects, entailed a decline in status for her and an advance for him—and a difficult burden for a young marriage to carry.
           
Mr. Epstein’s gift for atmospheric detail cuts deep, too. Death was a constant presence in 19th-century American life, and it hovers in the book as it did in the Lincoln’s marriage, with the early death of two of their four sons and the slaughter of the Civil War. Yet death could be a link between them. Mr. Epstein describes them visiting a military hospital, moving from cot to cot, “bonded in their compassion, knowing that wounded and dying soldiers lay in hospital beds and on hillsides from here to the horizon, and they could  comfort only these few, and for only a little while.”
           
Readers will be grateful for his modesty and for much else. He has written what may be the best Lincoln book in a generation.

From The Chicago Sun-Times

Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage is an act of biographical daring…. Through a mix of inspired speculation, abundant detail and a deep sympathy with his subjects, Epstein creates a touching, intimate portrait of one of history’s most famous couples….The book achieves a kind of miracle, that while it can’t really bring the reader inside the marriage, it comes so close that you can smell the lamp in the oil in the Lincolns’ Springfield parlor, and count off yards of ribbon on one of Mary’s shopping sprees….
           
The book ends as the marriage ends, with Lincoln’s death in a boarding house room, on a too-short bed, following his shooting by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre. Considering how familiar this scene is, it’s a tribute to Epstein’s power as a writer that it is so wrenching. We see Mary’s stream of consciousness, as she paces the hall, “dazed and chilled,” or weeps at his bedside as the secretary of war orders her away. For all its troubles, this was a successful marriage in that love endured on both sides, and its ending was unbearably cruel.

From The Washington Post

Epstein succeeds in delineating Abraham Lincoln, studious and thoughtful (sometimes to the point of catatonia), and Mary Todd Lincoln, whose high-energy existence could tip her into either full-blown psychotic rage or the depths of depression….Epstein’s literary talents shine in this book.

From The Columbus Dispatch

A laudable addition to the towering pile of Lincoln lore, an original take on a dynamic relationship. Epstein’s writing style is graceful and lucid. He never strains for effect, never sets off verbal pyrotechnics just for the sake of the razzle-dazzle. It’s a calm, measured, responsible book…hard to put down….The beauty of Epstein’s book lies in its precise explication of the everyday reality of a curious and fateful marriage. Abraham loved Mary, and she loved him. But that’s the easy part. Daily life is the real challenge, the true proving ground, whether you’re Lincoln or one of the rest of us.

Ken Burns

Will we ever tire of trying to understand this man? I doubt it, and in this impressive work, Daniel Mark Epstein approaches Lincoln through his complicated and revealing union with Mary Todd.”

John C. Waugh, author of One Man Great Enough, Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War

He has given us the best book yet written on the marriage of Abraham and Mary Lincoln—a comprehensive, sensitive, elegantly wrought masterpiece that puts us up close and personal with one of the most interesting pairings in American history.

Frank J. Williams, founding chair of the Lincoln Forum, member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission

Brilliantly conceived, The Lincolns is marked by meticulous scholarship and a balanced evaluation of the union that, until now, has confounded biographers and readers alike.

Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

The Lincolns’ marriage has always been shrouded in mystery and sadness. But in this fascinating biography by the peerless Epstein, the ties that bound them together are rendered with tender clarity. Beautifully written, impeccably researched, The Lincolns is destined to join the pantheon of indispensable books on the Civil War.”