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The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe]
eBook by Gore Vidal
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eBook Category: Mainstream
eBook Description:  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.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc./Doubleday General Adult, Published: 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2002
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Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT (718 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT (426 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT (514 KB], SECURE ADOBE READER 7 FORMAT (1.6 MB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [856 KB]
Words: 100000
Reading time: 285-400 min.
Secure Adobe: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Microsoft Reader ISBN, eReader (recommended) ISBN: 9781400032990
Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN, MobiPocket Reader ISBN: 1400032997
 
"The American tradition of independent and curious learning is kept alive in the wit and great expressiveness of Gore Vidal's criticism."--Citation for the 1982 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism "In 114 essays written over a period of forty years, Gore Vidal has shown himself to be a masterly, learned, and percipient observer of an unparalleled range of subjects. United States: Essays 1952-1992 assesses such diverse matters as modern French fiction, the Kennedys, underappreciated writers like Thomas Love Peacock, and the American attitude toward sex. He writes tenderly of authors and people he cherishes Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, William Dean Howells. Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience, and the persuasive powers of a great essayist."--Citation for the 1993 National Book Award "Gore Vidal, essayist; so good that we cannot do without him. He is a treasure of the state."--R. W. B. Lewis, New York Times Book Review "Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age, and we should thank the gods that we still have him to kick us around. Long may he flourish."--
Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "The century's finest essayist."--Jonathan Keates, Spectator
EDMUND WILSON:
NINETEENTH-CENTURY MAN
"Old age is a shipwreck." Like many a ground soldier, General de Gaulle
was drawn to maritime metaphors. Of course shipwrecks are not like happy
families. There is the Titanic-swift departure in the presence of
a floating mountain of ice, as the orchestra plays the overture from
Tales of Hoffmann. There is the slow settling to full fathom five
as holds fill up with water, giving the soon-to-be-drowned sufficient
time to collect his thoughts about eternity and wetness. It was Edmund
Wilson's fate to sink slowly from 1960 to June 12, 1972, when he went
full fathom five. The last entry in his journal is a bit of doggerel for
his wife Elena: "Is that a bird or a leaf? / Good grief! / My eyes are
old and dim, / And I am getting deaf, my dear, / Your words are no more
clear / And I can hardly swim. / I find this rather grim."
"Rather grim" describes The Sixties, Wilson's journals covering
his last decade. This volume's editor, Lewis M. Dabney, starts with an
epigraph from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," thus striking the
valetudinarian note. New Year 1960 finds Wilson at Harvard as Lowell
Professor of English. He suffers from angina, arthritis, gout, and
hangovers. "At my age, I find that I alternate between spells of
fatigue and indifference when I am almost ready to give up the struggle,
and spells of expanding ambition, when I feel that I can do more than
ever before." He is in his sixty-fifth year, a time more usually
deciduous than mellowly fruitful. But then he is distracted by the
people that he meets and the conversations that he holds, all the while
drinking until the words start to come in sharp not always coherent
barks; yet the mind is functioning with all its old energy. He is
learning Hungarian, as he earlier learned Hebrew and before that
Russian, a language whose finer points and arcane nuances he so
generously and memorably shared with Vladimir Nabokov, unhinging their
friendship in the process.
During his last decade, Wilson published Apologies to the
Iroquois, a project that he had set himself as, more and more, he
came to live in the stone house of his mother's family at Talcottville
in upstate New York. Although brought up in New Jersey, Wilson himself
was a classic old New York combination of Ulster and Dutch; and so, in a
sense, he had come home to die. Also, to work prodigiously. He made his
apologies to the Indian tribes that his family, among others, had
displaced. In O, Canada, he paid belated attention to the large
familiar remoteness to the north which he had visited in youth with his
father. He wrote book reviews; spent time at Wellfleet where he had a
house; visited New York; went abroad to Israel, Hungary.
The decade was made unpleasant by the fact that he had neglected to file
an income tax return between the years 1946 and 1955. The Internal
Revenue Service moved in. He was allowed a certain amount to live on.
The rest went to the Treasury. He was also under a grotesque sort of
surveillance. Agents would ask him why he had spent so much money for a
dog's cushion. Wilson's response to this mess was a splendid, much
ignored polemical book called The Cold War and the Income Tax,
which he saw as the two sides to the same imperial coin.
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