Gore Vidal, 1925-2012 (page 2)

Cover art for PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE

NONFICTION

Released: May 1, 2001

PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE: HOW WE GOT TO BE SO HATED

by Gore Vidal

"Challenging as ever, Vidal quotes Justice Brandeis: "If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for laws; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.""

In a piquant collection (originally published in Italy), Vidal (The Last Empire, 2001, etc.) asks readers to consider the forces that motivated Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden--and perhaps it wouldn't hurt to heed the beating the Bill of Rights has been taking recently. Read full book review >

FICTION

Released: Sept. 19, 2000

THE GOLDEN AGE

by Gore Vidal

"A beguiling conclusion to an invaluable extended work. If Vidal's novels were used as texts, we'd all be American History majors."

Though its narrative temperature remains dangerously low, entertainment value is dependably high in this seventh and last of Vidal's delectable Novels of Empire. Read full book review >

FICTION

Released: Feb. 8, 1999

THE ESSENTIAL GORE VIDAL

by Gore Vidal

"Essential work, indeed, and a good deal more fun to read than the work of many other highly esteemed writers who take themselves much more seriously."

It must seem no less galling than appropriate to Norman Mailer that not even a year after the appearance of his own bulky retrospective volume (The Time of Our Time) there arrives this bracing sampler of his formidable old enemy's variegated prose wares: on display—in judiciously mixed proportions—are the complete texts of Vidal's once notorious novel Myra Breckenridge (a then-timely jeu to which the years haven't been kind) and his outrageously savvy JFK-inspired play (The Best Man); choice excerpts from the loosely related fictional revisions of American history that began with Burr and extend (thus far) to Washington, D.C., and middling ones from other novels varying in quality from apprentice-like (The City and the Pillar) to dizzyingly inventive (Duluth) and urbane (Julian). Read full book review >

NONFICTION

Released: Dec. 1, 1998

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY

by Gore Vidal

"This is one of those times."

If Vidal (The Smithsonian Institution, 1998, etc.) isn't the last wild man remaining in the American literary left, then it's hard to say who is. Read full book review >

Cover art for THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

FICTION

Released: March 9, 1998

THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

by Gore Vidal

"Even Norman Mailer will like this novel."

Another merry riff on Washington power politics, struggles, and failures from the venerable curmudgeon and sage: an appealingly unholy marriage of Burr, Duluth, and a suavely Vidalian amalgam of Tom Sawyer and Tom Swift. Read full book review >

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Gore Vidal, 1925-2012 (page 2)