The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000Like 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. |
Contents
NineteenthCentury Man | 3 |
Queen of the Golden Age | 16 |
Lost New York | 30 |
The Romance of Sinclair Lewis | 46 |
Twain on the Grand Tour | 68 |
Twains Letters | 83 |
A Note on The City and the Pillar and Thomas Mann | 114 |
The Eagle Is Grounded | 129 |
Bad History | 292 |
Blair | 301 |
How We Missed the Saturday Dance | 307 |
The Last Empire | 313 |
In the Lair of the Octopus | 334 |
Time for a Peoples Convention | 341 |
The Union of the State | 351 |
Mickey Mouse Historian | 357 |
Sinatra | 149 |
George | 161 |
Love on the Hudson | 179 |
Wiretapping the Oval Office | 190 |
Clare Boothe Luce | 202 |
Truman | 217 |
Nixon R I P | 238 |
Bedfellows Make Strange Politics | 247 |
ClintonGore II | 254 |
Honorable Albert A Gore Junior | 265 |
Kopkind | 283 |
U S out of UNUN out of U S | 368 |
Race Against Time | 372 |
Chaos | 379 |
Shredding the Bill of Rights | 397 |
The New Theocrats | 419 |
Starr Conspiracy | 426 |
A Letter to Be Delivered | 436 |
Democratic Vistas | 444 |
Japanese Intentions in the Second World War | 457 |
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