United States by Gore Vidal Summary and Reviews
|
Our Price: $117.04 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $4.13 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of United States
Book Review: Gleefully malicious
Summary: 5 Stars
Gore Vidal possesses an immense erudition and a willingness to inflict it on anyone and everyone who doesn't measure up to his standards, with tremendously entertaining results. He is a pedant and a nitpicker who will not let be even the smallest things, and I would hate to be subjected to his merciless eye, but it's great to read about the people who have been.I bought the book for its first section, which consists of essays on literary matters (quite a few of them concerning people of whom I had never heard before -- some of whom I have now started reading just because of the essays), figuring that I could at worst skip the politics (the idea of which bored me) and still have quite a collection of essays in my hands. As it turned out, though, once I had made my way through that section I was so hooked on Vidal's drily contemptuous writing that I couldn't help continuing. I'm glad I read on, because his views (many of them bolstered by first-hand experience with the issues about which he's writing) and ability clearly and convincingly to expound them are amazing. He has really changed my ideas about a few issues. (There are also a few issues on which I think he can say nothing but educated nonsense, but I didn't read the book to have my own opinions parroted back at me.) The essays are fascinating, educating and entertaining, and the collection is superb -- trumping (in quantity and quality) just about any other book of his essays available. The ``sequel'' to this collection, Last Empire, can be a bit repetitive and shrilly alarmist, but this one is fresh and insightful throughout (perhaps because he's talking about events from which I feel sufficiently detached to be open-minded?).
The only slight complaint I have is that Vidal, in the middle of his complaints about the style and spelling problems of others, has some stingers of his own. (One of the most glaring is that he likes to set off parenthetical notes for example this one, with only a final comma.) I'd try to ignore this in an ordinary writer (should I say mere mortal?), but with someone who so clearly values pedantry and precision it is extremely jarring.
Book Review: Great reading guaranteed in perpetuity
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is so vast and so full of wisdom, prescience (read Vidal's 1970s attack on religion and compare its conciseness and brilliance with the just released polemics of Hitchins and Dawkins, and his 1950s biting comments on the culture of celebrity are so far ahead of their time that they're breathtaking), wit and humour that you can pick it up at any time and find what seems to be a new gem within. After 5 years of owning this book, I'm still finding pieces I either haven't read or now read with a different outlook, owing to Vidal's amazing ability to be so pertinent to all ages.
Highly recommended.
Book Review: Master Essayist At Work
Summary: 5 Stars
United States, the 1993 Winner of the National Book Award, it covers the years from 1952 until 1992. This book shows that Vidal is an authority/reliable source in many areas. He served in WWII and wrote his first novel while doing so. He comes form a political background; his grandfather, blind Senator T.P. Gore, brought him up. He is related to Eleanor Roosevelt and was friendly with JFK. He ran for Congress in New York in 1960 and came in second in the California democratic primary in 1982. Furthermore, his father served as director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under FDR, which gave him insight into the forming of airlines and access to Charles Lindberg. He wrote his first novel at the age of 20 and has subsequently written 23 other novels, most of them historical novels in which he did significant research to get the details just right. He has numerous interesting insights into the lives of other writers as well as being capable of writing compelling book chat. He has also written for TV and the movies, as a result knows a lot of famous Hollywood movers and shakers. His heroes (John Quincy Adams, FDR, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Bowles, Edmund Wilson, Charles Lindberg) and villains (Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, the CIA) are vividly drawn and expertly judged throughout. I am hesitant to recommend this tome that weighs in at 1295 pages and is the size of a reference book, but does seem all but indispensable, because it has many excellent and interesting essays. It is divided into three sections: state of the art (literature), state of the union (politics), and state of being (personal responses to people and events, not to mention movies and children's books). Not a light book to take on the train, this tome took me the better part of a year to finish, but was well worth it.
Book Review: Mencken and Paine would applaud
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great compilation of 40 years of insight into what really drives the republic: from the cult for the Kennedys, the Ron and Nancy show in pictures, the militancy of the Sky God people and the hypocritical sexual mores Vidal leaves no sacred cow unslaughtered and goes to the marrow of our most cherished myths. Unabashedly polemic and magisterial in his distain he proves that thinking critical and pushing the state sponsored purveyors of preciousness out of their well cottoned and financed closets is the best revenge. May he continue on to take the pulse of lazy thinkers everywhere and pronounce them comatose.Book Review: Outstanding, relevant and necessary
Summary: 5 Stars
These particular selections of essays by the prolific and most caustic critics of the American Republic, has sat on my bookshelf since the early months of 1999. Included in this overwhelming collection are 114 essays, in some cases, randomly categorized into three chapters - State of Art, State of the Union and State of Being. Vidal is an intensely knowledgeable fellow, and therefore has an opinion on just about everything having to do with art, history, politics, the state of literature and his beloved Republic To attempt to read this entire tome (1271 pages) from start to finish over a few weeks (my original intention) proved to be impossible. Although informative and extremely entertaining, there was just too much to digest, too important to scan through, thus I would mark the essays read with a tick on the contents page, place the book back on the shelf, only to return when the time felt right to take them up again.
Vidal is not only a great historian, he is also one of America's great literary radicals. He was experimenting with the literary form, attempting to apply critical theory to the Novel very early in the piece with such works as Duluth, Mira Breckinridge and the post modern religious satire, Live from Golgotha. These were indeed "radical" departures from the standard fare of American novels coming out at the time. In mainstream circles, however, these novels were not well received, but were critically acclaimed, calling them subversive, iconoclastic, original and extremely funny.
As an essayist, Vidal really has no match in American letters. These essays reveal a master at the top of their form. What is interesting as well as admirable, Vidal was criticising literary theory which had infiltrated academia in the late 60's and early 70's, al la, post structuralism and deconstructionism, but unlike the so-called "experts" in the university's across the western world, (he calls them "Hacks of Academia") Vidal attempted to put these theories to the test in the form of a popular novel, (Duluth) and succeeded. In his essay, "French Letters -Theories of the Modern Novel", Vidal attacks these modern theorists, who state that language and literature as an art form is dead, in elegant prose and biting gusto, revealing their empty (headed) arguments,
"In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayer they chant, we shall go on for quite as long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps with silence or with new words." (1967, p.110)
In "The State of the Union" essays, Vidal expounds upon American politics and his views on the National Security Council, the CIA and America's on-going imperialistic intentions, which interestingly, have not dated in the least. Most of these essays are as relevant as ever despite the passing of over thirty years.
There is no doubt in my mind that reading Vidal is an education, showing us a way through the miasma of received wisdom, relentlessly thrown in our direction. In many respects Vidal is a beacon of light during dark times, a writer that has never pulled any punches when it came to the things he believed in, namely writing, politics and his beloved Republic. This book should be standard issue for anyone interested in literature, politics, art, and American history.
1 2