Nobody makes the fur fly in a more elegant and civilized fashion Gore Vidal. Pieces that have already generated shock waves include his dispraise of the works of John Updike, his controversial defense of Charles Lindbergh, and his attack on the national security state that first appeared in Vanity Fair. There are warm (and shrewd) appreciation of Edmund Wilson, Dawn Powell, Sinclair Lewis, and Mark Twain polemical observations on the major figures and (as he sees it) deplorable developments in American politics Bill Clinton, FDR, JFK, his cousin Al Gore, the CIA and the American empire, the global reach of media conglomerates, and the United States' disdain for the UN-as well as fascinating autobiographical vignettes.

Essays 1952-1992, Vidal displays unparalleled range and inimitable style as he deals with matters literary, historical, personal, and political. Vidal’s style is unmistakable: erudite, contrarian, self-aggrandizing, elegant.

As in the previous volumes, which include the 1993 National Book Award-winning United States. THE LAST EMPIRE ESSAYS 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal RELEASE DATE: JMore political and literary essays from Vidal ( The Golden Age, 2000, etc.). The Last Empire is Gore Vidal's ninth collection of essays in the course of his distinguished literary career. (Jan.A new collection of provocative, witty, and eloquent by Gore Vidal, the greatest living American man of letters and one of the finest essayists of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. Readers could acquire most of Vidal's best work, still in print in paperback, for the same price as this collection. Try though he does to weave the pieces into a larger tapestry that reflects Vidal's long career, Kaplan actually deadens the pleasure of Vidal's prose by constant interruptions that didactically guide readers through a disparate body of work. In the name of saving the world from Communism, GORE VIDAL explains, its leaders created a National. Kaplan's dutiful selections show that Vidal's unique blend of erudition and wit is not well served by abbreviation, a limitation reinforced by Kaplan's laborious introductions, which help neither the reader nor Vidal (''Religion is another recurrent subject in Vidal's oeuvre'' the plots of Vidal's historical novels ''adhere to the laws of causality and representation associated with the realistic novel from Tom Jones to Gone With the Wind''). Fifty years ago, the American Republic set forth to become the American Empire. The collection also includes the novel Myra Breckinridge in its entirety and 21 essays more usefully collected in Vidal's United States: Essays 1952-1992, itself a 1000-plus-page volume that won the NBA in 1993 and provides a far more distinguished demonstation of Vidal's wide-ranging intellect. Four previously uncollected essays provide far too little novelty for such a long volume comprised mainly of fairly random excerpts from 12 of Vidal's 23 novels.

Readers interested in the ''essential'' Gore Vidal would be much better off with the complete books rather than with these truncated samples prepared by the writer's authorized biographer.

The last empire gore vidal