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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant Collection of Essays,
By
This review is from: Armageddon Essays 1983 1987 (Hardcover)
Gore was in rare form in the 80s, inspired by the Reagan Revolution and the rise of the Christian Right and their focus on Israel and the impending Armageddon.
His essays collected here, mostly from the New York Review of Books and the London Times literary supplement, range from devastatingly funny looks at Nixon and the Reagans, the rise of armageddon cultural politics, as well as simply brilliant essays on writing, Calvino, Dawn Powell, Paul Bowles and others. Each one takes you immediately inside Vidal's head, and his voice becomes yours as you savor every witty and insightful observation. A national treasure.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Canaille oblige,
By
This review is from: Armageddon?: Essays 1983-1987 (Paperback)
Gore Vidal gives us superbly vitriolic portraits of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, as well as of the Christian Right's Armageddon: 'Why conserve anything, if Judgment Day is at hand.'
But he sees through the rhetoric and the hypocrisy the real America of humming electric chairs and well-packed prisons. A US controlled by an oligarchical system where men of property can do well and the others are on their own; where the New Rich made their money with defence contracts, the circulus vitiosus 'transfer money from the Treasury to the various defence contractors which in turn pay for the election of Congress and President'; where the Pentagon is a black hole for wasted money while the public educational system is deteriorating because of a lack of investment. On the moral side, he remarks perspicuously that 'In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone.' But this book contains also some remarkable essays on world literature: Henry James ('monsters have triumphed yet again'); William Dean Howells ('a darkness sufficiently sable for even the most lost-and-found of literary generations'); Logan Pearsall Smith ('idiom before grammar'); Paul Bowles ('the strangeness and terror of waking dreams'); Tennesse Williams ('he certainly believed in sin'); Italo Calvino ('the many in the one'); Anthony Burgess ('3 obsessions: religion-art-sex'). A book of a remarkable observer and analyzer. We need his voice.
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