Rating: 
Summary: PRESCIENT, PROFOUND, AND ENTERTAINING: CLASSIC GORE VIDAL
Review: Gore Vidal is one of those writers who always challenges, excites, and stirs up my thinking. While I do not fully endorse all of the views in "THE LAST EMPIRE: ESSAYS 1992-2000", I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. He is one of the best. In terms of clarity of thought and analysis, Gore writes on subjects as varied as Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, JFK, FDR, Truman, Charles Lindbergh, John Updike (one of the funniest, most thoughtful and scathing essays in the book), "bad history", race relations, and the U.S. political system. Here are two examples of the passion and conviction Vidal brings to this book: 1) "...I invite the Senate to contemplate Vice President Aaron Burr's farewell to the body over which he himself had so ably presided: 'This house is a sanctuary, a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storm of political frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.' Do no harm to this state, Conscript Fathers." (essay on 'Birds and Bees and Clinton') 2) "What will the next four years bring? With luck, total gridlock. ... With bad luck (and adventures), Chancellor Cheney will rule. A former Secretary of Defense, he has said that too little money now goes to the Pentagon even though last year it received 51 percent of the discretionary budget. Expect a small war or two in order to keep military appropriations flowing. There will also be tax relief for the very rich. But bad scenario or good scenario, we shall see very little of the charmingly simian George W. Bush. The military - Cheney, Powell, et al. - will be calling the tune, and the whole nation will be on constant alert, for, James Baker has already warned us, Terrorism is everywhere on the march. We cannot be too vigilant. Welcome to Asuncion. Yes! We have no bananas."
The Nation 8/15 January 2001 (Essay on 'Democratic Vistas') No matter what one may think of Gore Vidal, his writings will always engage and challenge the reader to think, and think, and think. And learn.
Rating:
Summary: PRESCIENT, PROFOUND, AND ENTERTAINING: CLASSIC GORE VIDAL
Review: Gore Vidal is one of those writers who always challenges, excites, and stirs up my thinking. While I do not fully endorse all of the views in "THE LAST EMPIRE: ESSAYS 1992-2000", I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. He is one of the best. In terms of clarity of thought and analysis, Gore writes on subjects as varied as Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, JFK, FDR, Truman, Charles Lindbergh, John Updike (one of the funniest, most thoughtful and scathing essays in the book), "bad history", race relations, and the U.S. political system. Here are two examples of the passion and conviction Vidal brings to this book: 1) "...I invite the Senate to contemplate Vice President Aaron Burr's farewell to the body over which he himself had so ably presided: 'This house is a sanctuary, a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storm of political frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.' Do no harm to this state, Conscript Fathers." (essay on 'Birds and Bees and Clinton') 2) "What will the next four years bring? With luck, total gridlock. ... With bad luck (and adventures), Chancellor Cheney will rule. A former Secretary of Defense, he has said that too little money now goes to the Pentagon even though last year it received 51 percent of the discretionary budget. Expect a small war or two in order to keep military appropriations flowing. There will also be tax relief for the very rich. But bad scenario or good scenario, we shall see very little of the charmingly simian George W. Bush. The military - Cheney, Powell, et al. - will be calling the tune, and the whole nation will be on constant alert, for, James Baker has already warned us, Terrorism is everywhere on the march. We cannot be too vigilant. Welcome to Asuncion. Yes! We have no bananas."
The Nation 8/15 January 2001 (Essay on 'Democratic Vistas') No matter what one may think of Gore Vidal, his writings will always engage and challenge the reader to think, and think, and think. And learn.
Rating: 
Summary: mostly illogical, but intellegent
Review: Gore Vidal, clearly one of the great essayists of our time, a wonderful man to read. He speaks to the best iun us and one must be educated to fully comprehend his literary indulgences. Unfortunatly for all his grandeur this publication is mostly flawed. its essays ont he Japanese intentions in WWII, its view of Islam and his biased, illogical hateed of the Republicans and his view of Americas role in the world are all flawed. Nevertheless I recommend this book to anyone interested in reading a fair and intellegent critique of the conservative agenda. Most of illogical trash that documents Americas sopposed obessesion with dominating the world is not worth the reading. Pick up Gore's book but I would recommend bringing along some other sources so you can better be academically equipped to rebut Mr. Gores comments.
Rating:
Summary: mostly illogical, but intellegent
Review: Gore Vidal, clearly one of the great essayists of our time, a wonderful man to read. He speaks to the best iun us and one must be educated to fully comprehend his literary indulgences. Unfortunatly for all his grandeur this publication is mostly flawed. its essays ont he Japanese intentions in WWII, its view of Islam and his biased, illogical hateed of the Republicans and his view of Americas role in the world are all flawed. Nevertheless I recommend this book to anyone interested in reading a fair and intellegent critique of the conservative agenda. Most of illogical trash that documents Americas sopposed obessesion with dominating the world is not worth the reading. Pick up Gore's book but I would recommend bringing along some other sources so you can better be academically equipped to rebut Mr. Gores comments.
Rating:
Summary: Real History
Review: Indeed Gore Vidal wonderful essays have succeeded in telling us, because of big money Americas political party differences are moot. That we are an Empire(the last) with military bases on every continent, as well as ten aboard the aircraft carrier called the United Kingdom. And best of all to me that Clare boothe Luce was at the Ritze hotel in Paris when the Germans swept through France. She wanted to stay to the very end, but the concierge told her that she must leave the now diserted hotel, because "the Germans are coming". When Clare asked him how he knew , he said because they have reservations. Its little jewels like this that make a great book one you must own.
Rating:
Summary: Vidal In The Gloaming
Review: It seems perfectly fitting that Gore Vidal should become our leading man of letters here in fin de siecle America. Through his novels he has become our de facto historian, and through his essays he has emerged as a wry observer of American life and letters, although a sort of disembodied one, as he spends most of his time at his home in Italy. As he enters what is certainly the last fertile period of his life, we ask ourselves if The Last Empire will indeed be Vidal's last collection, or last memorable collection, of essays. If this should indeed be the case, Vidal has gone out a winner. Vidal's strong point as an essayist is not to lecture the reader, but rather to take the reader into his confidence, almost as if he was at his home in Ravello having a conversation. Whether he is discoursing on Claire Bothe Luce, Mark Twain, or the latest history of the Kennedy years, Vidal brings a lot of himself and his personal experiences to the page and opens up new vistas even to his most educated readers. The beauty of Vidal is no matter how much the reader brings to his essays, he or she will always leave with something, whether a previously unknown fact or a lead for further reading. One of the best essays in the book is "Twain on the Grand Tour," during the course of which Vidal takes apart an academic's book of psycho-babble on Twain. There is nothing Vidal dislikes more than academics who make their subjects fit whatever theory-of-the-day is popular, and by doing so, perform a disservice both to their subject and the reader. As a further bonus for us readers, the hapless fool Vidal criticized didn't know when he was beaten, and sent a reply. Vidal's riposte is a classic, hoisting the fool on his own petard and damning him with his own words. It's like watching an osprey catching fish in the water. One caveat, though. Vidal becomes glaringly inconsistent during the course of his political essays when he insists on issuing a free pass to the Clintons. It is apparent while reading the essays that he has succumbed to what passes for charm in the former First Family, Hillary especially. For him, she seems to represent some combination of the best of Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy. Though he says time and time again that it is impossible to be elected ruler of these United States unless one is part and parcel of the military-industrial complex, these rules seem to fly out the window when discussing the Clintons as brave reformers in the face of ignoble Republican opposition. In reality, Bill Clinton has proven to be no more than the poor man's Huey Long, while his wife is resentful and duplicitous. Were this America of the forties, Joan Crawford could have easily essayed her in one of the Warner potboilers of the day. It gets so even wooden Al Gore, of whon Vidal has said many unflattering things in the past, is given that ticket to ride. Vidal's strength is as a critic; his weakness is as a supporter. Nevertheless, even flawed Vidal is far. far better than what passes for literary criticism in today's America. One should always keep this in mind when contemplating this book's purchase.
Rating:
Summary: The Last Empire Essays 1992-2000
Review: More political and literary essays from Vidal (The Golden Age, 2000, etc.). Vidal's style is unmistakable: erudite, contrarian, self-aggrandizing, elegant. Cranky. Never has it been more Vidal-ian than here, in his ninth volume of essays, a collection of pieces written between 1992 and 2000 that occasionally borders on self-parody. By far the strongest works are the literary and historical sketches grouped at the beginning: witty, knowing, insightful, and carefully written, taken together they comprise a prickly tour of the midcentury world of American letters. The last 20 essays are far more problematic, however. In these Vidal rants endlessly about the National Security State and the American Empire, two self-identified postwar political structures that he claims have ruined everything good about America. If one hasn't read Vidal's take on these issues before, perusing one of these essays might be fun-but reading 20 of them is not. Although they have different titles and are nominally written on different subjects, the monotony of analysis is numbing. (Plus, it's hard to take Chicken Little seriously when, after nine volumes, the sky still hasn't fallen.) But no matter, there are plenty of fireworks in the literary and historical sections-most compellingly, in a wonderful riff on Sinclair Lewis that interlocks with a controversial defense of Charles Lindbergh in an attempt to revive an intriguing pre-WWII American icon: the plainspoken, isolationist, independent hero from the Great Plains. Amazingly, Vidal, for all his namedropping and urbanity, can't help but see himself in this role. A similarly palpable identification warms, to fascinating effect, the pieces on writers as diverse as Cavafy, Dawn Powell, and Mark Twain. And a merciless attack on Updike is not only provocative but wickedly funny, a flash of the younger Vidal's dead-on comic sense. Vidal's gossip can feel as stale as his (very dated) political concerns, but few today have what he still displays in abundance: the desire, the intelligence, and the wit to continue living as a true man of letters.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining romp through letters, politics and the pop cult
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining romp through letters, politics and the pop cult
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Gore Vidal has always been clear about what is real and true
Review: This collection of essays is written in Vidal's always concise, straight-to-the-point manner. As great as he is in the historical fiction genre (his works from "Burr" through "Empire" are true American classics), still, I think his essay work is his best venue. Split into four parts, the latter three are often brilliant. His essay "Wiretapping the Oval Office" is hilarious, while his "Time for a Peoples Convention" is timely, even before it became imperative. Vidal seems to have the knack for seeing the most viable probabilities before they become crystal clear. The man simply talks (and writes) sensible, if sometimes altruistic, ideas and ideals. "Race Against Time" is one of those altruistic, yet emminently sensible essays. If anyone doubts Vidal's knack for seeing political reality in advance, let me quote his 1992 essay "With Extreme Prejudice", "...there is no longer a rational for so many secret services unless the Feds really come out of the closet and declare war on the American people, the ultimate solution..." Patriot Act anyone? Part Four of this book of essays must be read. "Shredding The Bill Of Rights", written in 1998, is an eery, uncanny prediction (come true) of what is happening now - ostensibly as a result of the 9/11 attacks - but Vidal saw this coming well before that. Recently, an aquaintance of mine whose opinions I respect stated that "desperate times call for desperate measures" when I expressed my deep concern with the unusually (and, in my opinion, illegal and unconstitutional) wide scope and potential for serious abuse of power contained in the PATRIOT Act (an acronym for Providing Adequate Tools Required in order to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism). I reminded him that this was precisely the defense used at Nuremburg by Nazi defense council. Count on Vidal to always be on the cutting edge of what is coming to a Country near you.
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