Like his National Book Award—winning United States, Gore Vidal’s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire, affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects. From his celebrated profiles of Clare Boothe Luce and Charles Lindbergh and his controversial essay about the Bill of Rights–which sparked an extended correspondence with convicted Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh–to his provocative analyses of literary icons such as John Updike and Mark Twain and his trenchant observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, Vidal weaves a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Written between the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and the electoral crisis of 2000, The Last Empire is a sweeping coda to the last century’s conflicted vision of the American dream.
The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Gore Vidal admires Edmund Wilson, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, W.D. Howells, the recently resurrected Dawn Powell ("our best mid-century novelist") and the almost entirely unknown Isabel Potter. His praise, however, often seems a form of self-portraiture: when he remarks on Wilson's "powerful wide-ranging mind," one gets the feeling that he's glancing at a mirror. And in a public-relations first, he manages to extract a posthumous blurb of sorts from Thomas Mann 47 years after the publication of Vidal's novel The City and the Pillar (the German novelist had ignored the novel when Vidal sent it to him in 1948, but Vidal publishes here extracts from Mann's diary which describe the work as "brilliant" in parts but "faulty and unpleasant" overall). Vidal despises academics and the humorless, two groups apparently synonymous in his mind. There is a cautionary illustration here of the folly of answering a negative review: when Vidal trashes a Mark Twain biography and the author replies, Vidal's response is a crippling artillery blast. But that salvo is nothing compared to the tonnage he drops on arch-rival John Updike; Vidal devotes the longest of these essays to a merciless bombardment of Updike for being shallow and jingoistic, undeterred (or perhaps spurred on) by Updike's superior critical reputation. When not settling literary scores, Vidal turns to politics, where he belies his patrician background by consistently rooting for the little people in their struggles against an impersonal empire. In one especially choice paragraph, Vidal observes that two months after The City and the Pillar was published and its same-sex themes put an end to the political ambition his family had for him, his cousin Al Gore was born in a moment of "weird symmetry... whose meaning I leave to the witches on the heath." Commenting on Gore's central flaw, his Jimmy Carter-like obsession with flawless order, Vidal observes that the greatest presidents, such as FDR, knew that nothing really connects and that the best political minds simply adapt and move on. Vidal's ninth collection of essays, this one shows the mandarin populist to be at the height of his powers of both vituperation and sagacity. It leaves one impatient already for the tenth.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From Library Journal
Beginning with essays about Edmund Wilson, Isabel Potter, Isabel Bolton, and Dawn Powell is a subtle launch, since many listeners haven't thought about these literary luminaries since college, if ever. But soon more familiar names and events from literature and politics ignite sparks of interest: Bill Clinton, FDR, Al Gore, Sinclair Lewis, Charles Lindbergh, Harry Truman, Mark Twain, the Bill of Rights, World War II, and the war on drugs. Whether describing events the public witnesses through the news media lens (one chapter is titled "Birds and Bees and Clinton") or as legend (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's marriage), Vidal's perspectives are neither ordinary nor vernacular. The result is a satisfying intellectual workout for those who missed his original works in issues of The Nation, New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the like. This, Vidal's ninth collection, picks up where his 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction winner, United States: Essays, 1952-1992, left off. Narrator Dan Cashman's neutral and unbiased tone is the perfect trumpet for Vidal's snappy vocabulary and literary allusions. Recommended, but repackaging will be a must the original box is flimsy. Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
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More About the Author
Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining romp through letters, politics and the pop cult,
This review is from: The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 (Hardcover)
There is no question that Vidal likes to take people apart, especially political people. He likes to introduce the obtuse and stuffy to themselves, as it were, and to laugh at the pretentious. His favorite targets are on the Right, which is good, and his second favorite targets are on the Left, which is also good. He is, strange to say, and perhaps unbeknownst to himself, as American as pizza pie and Cabernet Sauvignon, matzo balls and chow mein. If he didn't exist we would have to invent him. He is the heir of Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson with a dollop of Truman Capote thrown in. His ego is as wide as the Mississippi and his self-aggrandizement as consistent as the winter snow in Buffalo. He has done everything in literature except write poetry, and he has probably done that, and I just don't know about it. He has run for congress, for president, written screenplays (e.g., Suddenly Last Summer) and TV scripts, plays, and appeared in a science fiction movie (Gattaca). He and William F. Buckley Jr. have played clowns for one another, and he has been the confidant, if not of presidents, then of first ladies. He thinks of himself as beautiful, although it's been a long time since he really cared about that. He is one of our finest and most penetrating social critics, an original who manages to occupy the left while maintaining a stance somewhere to the aristocratic right of the Boston blue bloods, although of course his roots are in the political south, in Tennessee, Washington, D.C. and Mississippi.I have never been able to read, much less appreciate, however, his fiction. No doubt the failure is mine. Yet I think it indisputable that Vidal is a much better essayist than he is a novelist. In this, his latest collection--effectively just a continuation of his United States: Essays 1952-1992 (1993), a massive volume of 1,278 pages, also jacketed ironically in red, white and blue--Vidal continues his unrelenting attack on all things pretentious, pompous, political and/or simply within reach. He can be balanced (as in "Edmund Wilson: Nineteenth-Century Man," the first essay), slighting with faint praise ("The Romance of Sinclair Lewis" p. 46), adoring ("Sinatra" p. 149), brutal (as in "Reply to a Critic" p. 79), and devastatingly funny, particularly when addressing the hijinks of American pols as in his essays on FDR, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Al Gore, etc. He is at his best when defending the constitution, human rights, freedom, and democracy against its enemies as in "Shredding the Bill of Rights," p. 397, "A Letter to Be Delivered," p. 436, and "Japanese Intentions in the Second World War," p. 457, not to mention perhaps a hundred other essays here and elsewhere. His main tactic is a cynical sarcasm laced with selected facts from his prodigious memory. He can be ironic and surgically subtle, but he is not above plain old ridicule. His style is accomplished and erudite without being stuffy. His treatment is popular but without any concessions to the verbally challenged. But Gore Vidal (the "Gore" is from his mother's side of the family, the same family that spawned Al Gore) is also a classicist, thoroughly at home in Roman and Greek literature, and especially in Greek culture. He is an expert on literature and politics, as knowledgeable as any academic and as cosmopolitan and worldly as any ambassador. It is one of the ironies of Vidal's life, he being a staunch foe of what he has always seen as the frivolity of "bookchat" and its best-seller mentality, that he became with the historical novels he started writing in the sixties, a best-selling author himself, and a darling of the bookchat set. Indeed, Gore Vidal is an ironic man: an American aristocrat who would disown his class and embrace the hoi-polloi while keeping his tie pin firmly in place. I was trying to see how his style has changed over the years, reading some of his essays from the fifties and sixties, and then this volume of 48 essays from the last decade. I must say that he is just as opinionated, assertive and eloquent as ever. I think he more carefully dotted his i's and crossed his t's in the old days, so that his sentences were perhaps a little more architectural, while today he is more relaxed and straight-forward. One might say, nowadays he just lets it fly. In short, this collection is a splendid, energetic and thoroughly enjoyable romp through Americana land courtesy of one of our great tour masters. Did I say that if Gore Vidal didn't exist, we would have to invent him? Certainly America's twentieth century would not be the same without him.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Patriotic Gore,
By
This review is from: The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 (Hardcover)
Gore Vidal is a patriot who sees America through the clear eyes of a long-term relationship. If an unexamined life is not worth living, then an unexamined country is not worth loving. Even as Mr. Vidal reviews our national foibles, examines our errors, and dissects our politicians his love of the founding principles of this flawed democracy shine through. There is no doubt as to Mr. Vidal's erudition, but he is also wickedly funny. Mr. Vidal is a political and social aristocrat that gives him name-dropping rights to the 20th century, and drop names he does. He's had dinner with everyone who matters, and it seems he's read everyone who matters more. Whether he's unveiling the secrets of America's entrance into WWII, or punching holes in Kenneth Starr's multi-million dollar investigation into Bill Clinton's peccadilloes he is unerringly on-the-mark. Gore Vidal is Noam Chomsky with a sense of humor, and the thinking persons' Michael Moore. These essays are a fascinating look at America, and a great read to boot.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vidal Redux!,
This review is from: The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 (Hardcover)
And we rejoice. Raconteur, critic, historian, polemicist, name-dropper - Gore Vidal either knew everybody who was anybody or is related to them. In this successor to "United States," we meet FDR, JFK and Jackie, Dawn Powell, Edmund Wilson, Nixon, Lindbergh and Sinclair Lewis, to name a few, and gain perspectives that nobody else could provide. We watch as Mr. Vidal hilariously demolishes a critic and marvel as he tears into John Updike. We learn that Thomas Mann was inspired by a Vidal novel to return to "Felix Krull." But for most of the book, we are treated to Mr. Vidal's vehemently expressed political views (the military-industrial complex runs the country, the American polity is a single party state with two right wings - Democratic and Republican, the Federal government is a form of tyranny, the majority of Americans are worse of than their counterparts in other rich countries). Whether you agree or not, reading Vidal always has the salutary effect of making you revisit your assumptions. This reader certainly awaits more from Gore.
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