united states essays gore vidal

United States: Essays 1952-1992

By: Gore Vidal

• Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
• Length: 60 hrs and 15 mins
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5 (26 ratings)

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• Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
• Length: 27 hrs and 8 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 212
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 174
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 174

Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athens - the Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Socrates - Cyrus recounts his days as he strives to resolve the fundamental questions that have guided his life’s journeys.

• 5 out of 5 stars

A Magnificent Tour de Force

• By Harry Haller on 01-31-20

• A Novel (Narratives of Empire, Book 1)
• Narrated by: Grover Gardner
• Length: 21 hrs and 20 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 934
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 800
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 800

Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated - and misunderstood - figures among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York City journalist. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series.

Finally! Vidal's Great Take on the Life of Burr

• By John Norton on 06-12-19

• Length: 18 hrs and 17 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 45
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 31
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 30

This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, historical apercus, and trenchant observations. Vidal’s compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author’s celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters - including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Intelligent, Amusing

• By David M Chesser on 06-02-20

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated

• American Imperialism, Book 1
• Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 17
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 13
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 13

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

• 4 out of 5 stars

Gore Vidal Shits on Everything

• By Jeremy Hager on 01-17-20

• Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner, George Newbern, David de Vries, and others
• Length: 20 hrs and 34 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 282
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 238
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 236

Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign.

Brilliant narration!

• By Abhishek Deepak on 10-23-19

The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

• By: Gore Vidal, Jay Parini - editor
• Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 11
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 10
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 10

Gore Vidal - novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist - is America’s premier man of letters. No other writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.

By: Gore Vidal , and others

Myra Breckinridge

• A Novel (Myra and Myron, Book 1)
• By: Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia - introduction
• Narrated by: Michelle Hendley, Camille Paglia
• Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 72
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 57
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 56

"I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess." So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees. Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent, Myra's moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.

Well performed

• By Kenny D on 06-08-19

The City and the Pillar

• Narrated by: Will Damron
• Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 156
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 139
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 139

Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in “awful kid stuff,” the experience forms Jim’s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents’ expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship.

• 1 out of 5 stars

Do not listen to the introduction!!!!!

• By Billmatto on 12-05-19

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

By: Christopher Hitchens

• Narrated by: Simon Prebble
• Length: 28 hrs and 22 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,266
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,061
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,046

The first new collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell.

• By Davol2449 on 09-02-11

Empire of Self

• A Life of Gore Vidal

By: Jay Parini

• Narrated by: John Lescault
• Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 103
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 91
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 91

The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.

• By Christopher on 03-22-16

The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

By: Seymour M. Hersh

• Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
• Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 131
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 104
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 101

In 2011, an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden, the man the United States had begun chasing before the devastating attacks of 9/11. The news did much to boost President Obama’s first term and played a major part in his reelection victory of the following year. But much of the story of that night, as presented to the world, was incomplete, or a lie. The evidence of what actually went on remains hidden.

• By Amazon Customer on 08-22-17

The Complete Essays of Montaigne

• By: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Donald M. Frame - translator
• Narrated by: Christopher Lane
• Length: 49 hrs and 34 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 459
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 384
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 375

“A faithful translation is rare; a translation which preserves intact the original text is very rare; a perfect translation of Montaigne appears impossible. Yet Donald Frame has realized this feat. One does not seem to be reading a translation, so smooth and easy is the style; at each moment, one seems to be listening to Montaigne himself - the freshness of his ideas, the unexpected choice of words. Frame has kept everything.” (Andre Maurois, The New York Times Book Review )

Stands next to the Bible and M.A.'s Meditations

• By Darwin8u on 05-21-12

By: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , and others

Esoterrorism

• Red Room, Book 1

By: C. T. Phipps

• Narrated by: Jeffrey Kafer
• Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 104
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 100

Derek Hawthorne was born to be an agent of the Red Room. Literally. Raised in a conspiracy which has protected the world from the supernatural for centuries, he's never been anything other than a servant of their agenda. Times are changing, though, and it may not be long before their existence is exposed. When a routine mission uncovers the latest plan of the magical terrorist, the Wazir, Derek finds himself saddled with a new partner. Who is the mysterious but deadly Shannon O'Reilly? What is her agenda?

Another fun Phipps/Kafer team up

• By AudiobookMel on 10-05-19

Collected Stories

• By: Saul Bellow, Janis Bellow - editor and preface, James Wood - introduction
• Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner, Richard Poe, Kate Reading, and others
• Length: 26 hrs and 4 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 20
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 18
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 18

Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as "What Kind of Day Did You Have?", "Leaving the Yellow House", and a previously uncollected piece, "By the St. Lawrence". With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new listeners.

• 3 out of 5 stars

Didn't love this collection

• By Michael on 05-03-21

By: Saul Bellow , and others

• A History of New York City to 1898
• By: Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace
• Narrated by: Victor Bevine
• Length: 67 hrs and 25 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 265
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 221
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 221

In Gotham , Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. The events and people who crowd this audiobook guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America....

THANK YOU!!!!!

• By Stephen F (SPFJR) on 09-29-18

By: Edwin G. Burrows , and others

Dark Agenda

• The War to Destroy Christian America

By: David Horowitz

• Narrated by: Phil Paonessa
• Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 1,479
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,284
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 1,275

New York Times best-selling author David Horowitz exposes not only the progressive war against Christianity but also a war against America and its founding principles - which are Christian in their origin. Dark Agenda is about an embattled religion, but, most of all, it is about our imperiled nation. Tackling a broad range of issues from prayer in the schools to the globalist mindset, Horowitz traces the anti-Christian movement to its roots in communism.

Another Gem From David Horowitz

• By OhHaleYeah on 03-27-19

Mobituaries

By: Mo Rocca

• Narrated by: Mo Rocca
• Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,024
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 1,733
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,721

Mo Rocca has always loved obituaries - reading about the remarkable lives of global leaders, Hollywood heavyweights, and innovators who changed the world. But not every notable life has gotten the send-off it deserves. His quest to right that wrong inspired Mobituaries , his number one hit podcast. Now with Mobituaries , the audiobook, he has gone much further, with all new essays on artists, entertainers, sports stars, political pioneers, founding fathers, and more. Even if you know the names, you’ve never understood why they matter...until now.

Very good, but.....

• By Christopher on 11-15-19

• Narrated by: Christopher Hitchens
• Length: 17 hrs and 29 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,393
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,954
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,938

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature.

Truth, the whole truth and nothing but.

• By Laura on 08-23-10

Publisher's summary

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams, and Anais Nin.

The essays that appear in this work were originally published in Architectural Digest, Book Week, Commentary, Encounter, Esquire, London Sunday Telegraph, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, New World Writing, The Observer, Partisan Review, Playboy, The Reporter, The Threepenny Review, The Times, Times Literary Supplement, Vanity Fair, and Zero . "Paul Bowles's Stories" was originally published as the Introduction to Collected Stories of Paul Bowles (Black Sparrow Press, 1983). "H. L. Mencken the Journalist" was originally published as the Foreword to The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories edited by Elizabeth Rodgers (Doubleday/Anchor Books).

• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: History

Related to this topic

• Her Life and Work

By: Benjamin Moser

• Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
• Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 108
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 86
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 85

No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.

Cloying voice

• By Suzanne on 11-02-19

Shakespeare in a Divided America

• What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future

By: James Shapiro

• Narrated by: Fred Sanders
• Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 324
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 280
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 277

The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.

An Entertaining History Lesson

• By David on 08-17-20

Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies

• How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

By: Elizabeth Winkler

• Narrated by: Eunice Wong
• Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 53
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 43
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 43

The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies , journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.

• By Virgil Tracy on 06-03-23

Cultural Amnesia

• Notes in the Margin of My Time

By: Clive James

• Narrated by: Clive James
• Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 149
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 103

From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.

Very enjoyable and well narrated

• By Larbi on 05-18-08

Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

By: Andrew S. Curran

• Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
• Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 46
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 37
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 37

Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.

lifelong coverage of his life.

• By Michael Daly on 03-22-21

Making History

• The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past

By: Richard Cohen

• Narrated by: Richard Cohen
• Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 42
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 37
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 35

There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this “witty, wise, and elegant” ( The Spectator ), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country.

Missing 20 pages from book

• By Rick, Austin on 04-23-22

"The Rest of Us"

• The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

By: Stephen Birmingham

• Narrated by: Mel Foster
• Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 36
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 33
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 31

The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined.

Book 3 of 3

• By Etoile NEOhio on 11-15-22

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

By: Gerald Martin

• Narrated by: Sean Crisden
• Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 75
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 58
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 62

In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.

Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.

• By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13

Author in Chief

• The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote

By: Craig Fehrman

• Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 31
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 28
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 28

In Craig Fehrman’s groundbreaking work of history, Author in Chief , the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history - Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography , which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929 - to ones we know and love - Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father , which was very nearly never published - Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works.

Fascinating

• By Jean on 03-12-20

Batman Unauthorized

• Vigilantes, Jokers, and Heroes in Gotham City
• By: Dennis O'Neil - editor, Leah Wilson - editor
• Narrated by: Colby Elliott
• Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 162
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 147
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 147

Compiled by a veteran writer of the comic series, this collection of essays explores Batman’s motivations and actions, as well as those of his foes. Batman is a creature of the night, more about vengeance than justice, more plagued by doubts than full of self-assurance, and more darkness than light. He has no superpowers, just skill, drive, and a really well-made suit.

batman uninformed opinions

• By Aurey C. on 04-13-17

By: Dennis O'Neil - editor , and others

Oliver Wendell Holmes

• A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

By: Stephen Budiansky

• Narrated by: Robertson Dean
• Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 426
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 358
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 355

Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls barely missed his heart and spinal cord. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age 61, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court's reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms.

Top-Notch Biography

• By Jean on 08-01-19

Ayn Rand and the World She Made

By: Anne C. Heller

• Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
• Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 339
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 203
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 209

Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged , which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.

Great history of both Rand and her era

• By Mark on 08-07-10

Looking for Lorraine

• The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

By: Imani Perry

• Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
• Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 166
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 140
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 141

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun , her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.

• By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19

The Republic of Imagination

• America in Three Books

By: Azar Nafisi

• Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
• Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 56
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 50
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 50

Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.

• By Rebecca on 05-29-16

Jewish Comedy

• A Serious History

By: Jeremy Dauber

• Narrated by: Jeremy Dauber
• Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 176
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 152
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 152

In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from Biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing his book thematically into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy - including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar - Dauber explores the ways Jewish comedy has dealt with persecution, assimilation, and diaspora through the ages. He explains the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the JAP, and the schlemiel and schlimazel.

• 2 out of 5 stars
• By supermantwo on 08-31-20

The Roman Way

By: Edith Hamilton

• Narrated by: Nadia May
• Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 198
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 150
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 150

Edith Hamilton shows us Rome through the eyes of the Romans. Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Augustus come to life in their ambitions, their work, their loves and hates. In them we see reflected a picture of Roman life very different from that fixed in our minds through schoolroom days, and far livelier.

• By steve on 04-25-11

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Inventing a Nation

• Washington, Adams, Jefferson
• Narrated by: Paul Hecht, Gore Vidal
• Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 326
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 159
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 161

Volumes have been written about George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, but no previous work captures the intimate and vital details the way Inventing a Nation does. Vidal's consummate skill takes you into the minds and private rooms of these great men, illuminating their opinions of one another and their concerns about crafting a workable democracy.

Reader Beware: Mixed with a political agenda

• By Robert on 09-09-04

The Last Empire

• Essays 1992-2000
• Narrated by: Dan Cashman
• Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 1
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 1
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 1

The Last Empire is a collection of provocative, witty, and eloquent essays by Gore Vidal about all things USA. In more than two dozen essays, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects, offering incisive observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, and the Clintons—interwoven with a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail.

The 99% Invisible City

• A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
• By: Kurt Kohlstedt, Roman Mars
• Narrated by: Roman Mars
• Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 598
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 494
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 494

99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.

• By Louise Schraa on 01-09-21

By: Kurt Kohlstedt , and others

The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution: 1763-1789

By: Robert Middlekauff

• Narrated by: Robert Fass
• Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,286
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,089
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,084

The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.

Strong History Rich With Behind The Scenes Details

• By John on 10-06-11

The Naked and the Dead

By: Norman Mailer

• Narrated by: John Buffalo Mailer
• Length: 26 hrs and 14 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 415
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 364
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 364

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer.

John Buffalo Mailer narrates his father's book

• By J. Larson on 08-11-16

• Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
• Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 20
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 15
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 16

Messiah traces the collapse of Christianity and the rise of the next great religion of Western civilization: Cavism. Founded by undertaker John Cave, Cavism holds that it is a holy thing to die. Packaged by a marketing genius, the new religion conquers the world more quickly than any prior memeplex, but pockets of resistance remain. Eugene Luther, formerly an apostle of Cavism, now a hunted apostate, writes his memoirs as a last gesture of freedom while the noose of a totalitarian religious state tightens around him.

A Really Well Read Story And Very Professional Audiobook

• By Frank Donnelly on 05-02-21

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

By: Anthony Powell

• Narrated by: Simon Vance
• Length: 21 hrs
• Overall 3.5 out of 5 stars 730
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 502
• Story 3.5 out of 5 stars 494

Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art.

It is no good being a beauty alone...

• By Darwin8u on 02-24-16

The Soviet Sixties

By: Robert Hornsby

• Narrated by: Peter Noble
• Length: 20 hrs and 29 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 12
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 12
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 12

Beginning with the death of Stalin in 1953, the "sixties" era in the Soviet Union was just as vibrant and transformative as in the West. The ideological romanticism of the revolutionary years was revived, with renewed emphasis on egalitarianism, equality, and the building of a communist utopia. Mass terror was reined in, great victories were won in the space race, Stalinist cultural dogmas were challenged, and young people danced to jazz and rock and roll. Robert Hornsby examines this remarkable and surprising period.

Comprehensive and Emtertaining

• By Peter on 02-26-24

The Birth of Classical Europe

• A History from Troy to Augustine
• By: Simon Price, Peter Thonemann
• Narrated by: Don Hagen
• Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 144
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 118
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 117

To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....

Excellent overview of the Classical World

• By David I. Williams on 01-12-14

By: Simon Price , and others

A New World Begins

• The History of the French Revolution

By: Jeremy D. Popkin

• Narrated by: Pete Cross, Jeremy D. Popkin
• Length: 21 hrs and 54 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 291
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 249
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 248

The principles of the French Revolution remain the only possible basis for a just society - even if, after more than 200 years, they are more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins , Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society.

• By Kindle Customer on 04-26-22

What listeners say about United States: Essays 1952-1992

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this is the best anthology I have ever read. i highly recommend this to anyone looking to expand a horizon or two within themselves.

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4 people found this helpful

An entertaining anthology & a superb narration

Agree with him always or not, Gore Vidal was perhaps the greatest analyst of the American experiment ever. Always witty, smug and insightful, he made reading 'events' a joy and a true education, unlike today when political discourse is a bloodsport and reads like partisan politburo's constructing Gulags for the opposition, when biting satire would do the job nicely. But satire requires intelligence, Gulags are the work of thugs. I read substantial portions of this book decades (I think) ago. But it is just as much an intellectual feast hearing it today on Audible. Especially with such a superb and gifted narrator who often makes me forget that I am not exactly listening to Vidal himself.

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United States Essays 1952-1992 Paperback – Jan. 1 1731

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• Language English
• Publisher Abacus
• Publication date Jan. 1 1731
• Dimensions 12.7 x 6.35 x 19.69 cm
• ISBN-10 0349105243
• ISBN-13 978-0349105246
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Abacus (Jan. 1 1731)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0349105243
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0349105246
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 894 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 6.35 x 19.69 cm
• #5,828 in Literary Criticism & Theory
• #15,486 in Travel Reference & Tips (Books)

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.

Photo by David Shankbone (Photographer's blog post about the photo and event) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Two Score of Gore Date: June 20, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By R. W. B. Lewis; Lead: UNITED STATES Essays 1952 - 1992 . By Gore Vidal . 1,295 pp. New York: Random House. $37.50. Text: THIS gigantic volume brings together essays and articles written by Gore Vidal over 40 years, interspersed as it were between his novel writing (23 novels to date, including the acclaimed fictional biography of America: "Lincoln," "1876," "Empire" and so on), playwriting ("Visit to a Small Planet" and "The Best Man") and sundry television and screenwriting chores. As an older colleague once said to me about a wondrously energetic younger man, "He writes faster than I can read." "United States: Essays 1952-1992" divides into three parts, or "states" -- literature, the public world, the personal life -- and there are 114 pieces in all, some of them full-scale appraisals, always beautifully informed, of the author or topic in question. The book's title suggests Mr. Vidal's hope that united they may all stand. They mostly will, especially as animated by Mr. Vidal's sweeping, grasping prose style, with its mix of the elegant and the wittily vernacular. Within the literary component, we are given articles examining English writers from Thomas Love Peacock and George Meredith down through Christopher Isherwood and V. S. Pritchett (who is rightly and acutely praised as a critic). It is impossible to think of another American observer so intimately acquainted with the English world of letters and its tradition (Peacock's "novel-as-dialogue" even exerted an influence on the novelist Vidal, as Mr. Vidal acknowledges, of "The Judgment of Paris," in his own respectful review of a 1968 scholarly book called "Gore Vidal"). The American literati considered here are a much more varied lot. There is a splendid and welcome essay on Fredric Prokosch, reminding us of the power and productivity of this shamefully neglected self-exiled (to the south of France) writer, the author of, among other books, "The Seven Who Fled" in 1937 (about European escapees on the run from a disintegrating Tashkent). There are amiable jostlings with Norman Mailer (and his "nice but small gift for self-destruction") and thoughtful glances at John O'Hara, Paul Bowles and Henry Miller, along with Mr. Vidal's attention-seizing diatribes in the 1970's against best-selling novels, the New Novel (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon et al., most of whom, in my view, Mr. Vidal misreads), academic critical theorists far and wide (back on target) and the nonreading or wrong-reading American public. At the heart of the American literary section is an assessment of the social novel as very differently practiced by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Dawn Powell and Louis Auchincloss. If Mr. Vidal is expert on Henry James, especially on a collection of his book reviews, he is better than that on Howells. In fact, the long essay on Howells, occasioned by a Library of America volume of his fiction, is probably the most substantial and searching discussion of that writer, and the soundest in its judgment, yet written. It begins with Howells's open letter to The New York Tribune in 1886, vigorously protesting the unjust condemnation to death of seven persons following the Haymarket Street riots in Chicago -- the only one of "the Republic's major literary and intellectual figures," Mr. Vidal emphasizes, who "took a public stand." It continues through a shrewd tracing of Howells's entire career and exemplary readings of such Howells novels as "A Modern Instance" and "Indian Summer." As to Dawn Powell, a longtime resident of Greenwich Village (she died there in 1965) and the author of such should-be-classic stories of the provincial amid the anarchy and charm of New York City as "The Wicked Pavilion" and "The Golden Spur," Mr. Vidal follows Edmund Wilson in a vain attempt to establish her name and her achievement. About Louis Auchincloss, Mr. Vidal remarks accurately that he is the only fiction writer in the country who tells us how "our rulers" actually behave in their board rooms and law offices and clubs; and that by betraying his patrician class and forging his own literary tradition (mostly Henry James and Edith Wharton), Mr. Auchincloss has created a unique place for himself. Exploring the public scene, Mr. Vidal writes luminously about Presidential families -- the Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys -- unintentionally, no doubt, giving the impression that he is somehow related to all of them, at least by marriage. He evinces an attractively personal admiration and affection for Eleanor Roosevelt (she "never stopped believing" that the wrongs of human society "can be put right by human action"); and he refers repeatedly to Ronald Reagan, with casual wit, as "the Acting President." We are provided with a full display of Mr. Vidal's social and political opinions. The moment I salute most warmly is his memory (and ours) of a televised "live chat" with William F. Buckley Jr. at the Republican National Convention in 1968, when Mr. Vidal, as he says, "came close to revealing what I really am: a dedicated anti-anti-Communist." Say it again. Even more stirring are the half-dozen pieces, about a hundred pages altogether, addressed to the whole matter of sex, law and politics -- more generally sexuality and cultural mores, with the main stress on homosexuality, or in Mr. Vidal's preferred phrase same-sex sex. In this area Mr. Vidal writes more intelligently, knowingly, angrily, compassionately, entertainingly and downright smartly than anyone else around. There is a book about homosexuality and the American temperament embedded in "United States," and the centerpiece of it would be his 1981 article in The Nation about the soul-shriveling prejudice of the evangelical right and its kin against gays and Jews ("Pink Triangle and Yellow Star"). Included in such a book would be Mr. Vidal's tender memories of Tennessee Williams and other gay writer friends (with a note reporting Mr. Vidal's rejection of the word "gay" as "a ridiculous word to use as a common identification for Frederick the Great, Franklin Pangborn and Eleanor Roosevelt"). IN the shorter third section, Mr. Vidal escorts us through reminiscences of West Point, where his father was the first aviation instructor (hence also Mr. Vidal's fascinating follow-up discourse "On Flying") and where he was born in 1925; of television and theater writing; of life in Hollywood and Italy. Here and elsewhere Mr. Vidal evokes his association with Italo Calvino, the supremely gifted and extraordinarily engaging Italian writer, upon whose death at 61 in 1985 "Italy went into mourning, as if a beloved prince had died." Mr. Vidal attended Calvino's funeral on a rainy hillside not far from his own long-established home at Ravello, south of Naples. It has to be said that this collection is a good deal too long. A number of the pieces were really not worth reprinting: for example, the silly put-down, in the arch voice of a women's-club speaker, of Robert Penn Warren's novel "Band of Angels." It is hardly one of Warren's best, but it and he deserve better than this kind of campy snickering. Mr. Vidal's often headlong pace of thought and expression can lead him into bizarre generalizations, as when he identifies "the main purpose of literary biography" in our time as being "the Life as opposed to the Work." I think of Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, Ernest Samuels and other biographers who endlessly intermesh the Work with the Life and wonder what on earth Mr. Vidal is talking about. Over all, 1,200-plus pages of Mr. Vidal take a toll; I couldn't help recalling Alice Gibbens James's comment in a letter to her husband, William, about the aftereffect of a long evening's conversation with brother Henry. "Very pleasant," she said, "but leaving a curious lassitude behind." But Alice quickly added: "And he is so good!" Likewise Gore Vidal, essayist; so good that we cannot do without him. He is a treasure of state.

“United States: Essays, 1952-1992” by Gore Vidal

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Gore Vidal the novelist’s best character is Gore Vidal the essayist. Beside him even Myra Breckenridge seems a pale creation, and this great fat book, chronicling 40 years of the essayist’s adventures, is like a lively picaresque novel in reverse.

Its hero starts out as a wickedly clever but world-weary 26-year-old: between the inauguration of Eisenhower (“The Great Golfer”) and the election of Clinton (sobriquet still to come), he grows steadily cleverer, funnier, more indignant and less amenable to compromise. At 66, Vidal appears to be just coming to his full dimensions as an enfant terrible: one of the best, most stinging pieces in the book is a passionate attack on Christianity--and, for good measure, Judaism and Islam--published last July.

Age has strengthened his hand, in part because the character of Vidal the essayist has always rested on his claim to possess a memory that goes back, in leaps and bounds, at least 2,000 years. America (a k a “Amnesia”) forgets; Vidal remembers. He has put together for himself a lineage that makes him as old as the hills. His father’s job, as director of the Bureau of Air Commerce during the New Deal, makes Vidal a vicarious intimate of F.D.R. (and a friend of Eleanor’s); his maternal grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma, gives him a foothold in the ruling class under Theodore Roosevelt. From there, it is a short hop to Lincoln’s Washington. (Vidal, like Lincoln’s son Robert, went to school at Exeter, where, circa 1940, “memories of Lincoln were still vivid.” Vidal is a great one for milking his connections, however far-fetched or cousinly far-removed.) The Lincoln link gets him, in another long stride, to Jefferson, Tom Paine, Voltaire, from whom he makes the easy jump to Swift and Montaigne. Once there, he takes the 30-minute shuttle back to the Roman satirists, Juvenal and Martial. In no time at all, the friend of John F. Kennedy (“I told Jack that (Tennessee Williams had commented favorably on his ass. He beamed. ‘Now, that’s very exciting,’ he said”), the fifth--or is it sixth?--cousin to Jimmy Carter, and sometime Democratic Liberal candidate for the U.S. Senate, is in toga and sandals, his gray locks becomingly encircled by a wreath of bays.

The pose is crucial to Vidal’s literary method. Seen from this quasi-Roman perspective, everything from Christianity to television presents itself as a vulgar abomination. For Vidal, though a contributing editor to the Nation and widely thought of as a dangerous lefty, is a conservative. The past he appeals to is simply a much older past than the one beloved by the American Spectator and the National Review--not the Golden Age of unbridled Victorian capitalism but the era of Enlightenment rationalism and the sexy, literate, secular society of Rome before the later Caesars corrupted it with their tyranny. There is a lot of Latin in his prose style--its sting-in-the-tail sentences, their poison cunningly withheld until the clinching verb at the end--and Latin, too, in the characteristic Vidal mixture of sensuality and high-spirited ferocity.

Satire, he wrote in 1958, “is truth grinning in a solemn canting world.” It’s the grin that makes Vidal irresistible--his huge appetite for pure verbal mischief. No one else would manage to identify George Bush’s home town as Kennebunkport, Tex.--as no one else would labor for several paragraphs under the happy misapprehension that Hilton Kramer is a resort hotel in the Catskills. Vidal’s anecdotes are laced with threads of finespun malice. In an essay on Frederic Prokosch, he describes taking Prokosch to an academic party full of tenured poets:

“Prokosch was entirely ignored. But he listened politely as the uses of poetry in general and the classics in particular were brought into question. Extreme positions were taken. Finally one poet-teacher pulled the chain, as it were, on all of Western civilization: The classics, as such, were totally irrelevant. For a moment there was a blessed silence. Then Prokosch began to recite in Latin a passage from Virgil; and the room grew very cold and still. ‘It’s Dante,’ a full professor whispered to a full wife.”

Nor is Vidal ever too pushed for time to settle an old score when the opportunity arises. In the course of a particularly brilliant piece about Somerset Maugham, he suddenly pulls off the shelf an “agreeable picture book” about Maugham, compiled some 15 years before by Frederic Raphael, an English book reviewer. “Mr. Raphael,” writes Vidal, “quotes from Dreiser, whom he characterizes as ‘an earnest thunderer in the cause of naturalism and himself a Zolaesque writer of constipated power.’ Admittedly, Dreiser was not in a class with Margaret Drabble, but--constipated?” Here Vidal posts an asterisk, which leads to the only footnote in the essay:

* Mr. Raphael has many opinions about books that he has not actually read. You will see him at his glittering best in the Times, in his obituary of Gore Vidal (date to come).

Such parenthetical skirmishes and revenges give a tart edge to Vidal’s writing even at its sweetest and most reminiscent: You never know when he’s going to find an enemy to wipe the floor with.

His style is provocatively de haut en bas; it is the style of a man who has spent a lifetime suffering fools ungladly. He is fond of tweaking his readers’ ears, school master-fashion: “Third Republic? Fourth Republic? What am I talking about? Let me explain”; “ . . . the penultimate Dispensation? The what? Let me explain.” In “The State of the Union: 1975” he regaled the readers of Esquire with his state-of-the-union address for 1974, interleaved with notes on its reception by the various women’s luncheon clubs at which it was delivered. “ . . . Nervous intake of breath on this among women’s groups . . . . “ “ Sodomy gets them. For elderly, good-hearted audiences I paraphrase, the word is not used.” To the Esquire sophisticates, Vidal confided that he tried to speak wherever possible to “conservative middle-class audiences off the beaten track--Parkersburg, West Virginia; Medford, Oregon; Longview, Washington.”

Irony, as Fowler nicely explains in “Modern English Usage,” is a form that always requires two audiences: one that gets it, and one that doesn’t (though Fowler puts it more prettily than that); or that enlightened legion of subscribers to Esquire (Esquire?) and the flag-waving, church-supper blue-rinse crowd. Getting the one to laugh at the reactionary naivete of the other is a standard Vidal tactic. So is his trick of seeming condemned to fight Reason’s lonely corner in venues like Longview, Wash. and Medford, Ore. Like St. Stephen, Vidal needs the stones to keep coming.

There is another sort of irony here. The appearance of Olympian solitude is a necessary part of Vidal’s pitch as the unregarded wise man in a crass, uneducated world. Yet the world is constantly regarding him: he’s on Larry King, Barbara Walters, Dick Cavett; he’s playing himself in the movies; 14 months ago (let’s say), the views of Gore Vidal were a good deal better known than those of the current President of the United States. Nor are his views so shockingly heterodox (and I write as someone who lives within spitting distance, more or less, of Longview, Wash.): cut the defense budget and put an end to the “garrison state”; tax the profits of churches like those of other businesses; restore literacy; cure society of its superstitious homophobia; limit campaign spending; stop state interference in matters of private morality; discourage “schoolteachers” from writing “R&D” novels (John Barth’s “The Sot-Weed Factor,” the later Pynchon) whose chief function is to be taught in class; give thanks for “R&R” writers like Louis Auchincloss and Dawn Powell (a writer new to me, who turns out to be much funnier and more vivid about New York life in the 1940s and ‘50s than her British namesake, Anthony, is about London life in the same period); undermine the complacent hegemony of the New York Times.

Vidal the controversialist has a genius for making his least controversial thoughts take on the dangerous glitter of sedition. In 1986 he addressed the question of the American deficit vis-a-vis the growing economic dominance of Japan. That topic. It was less frequently spoken of then than now, but Vidal was hardly breaking new ground--except in his phrasing of the problem.

” . . . last summer (not suddenly, I fear) we found ourselves close to $2 trillion in debt. Then, in the fall, the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that was the end of our empire. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we--the white race--have become the yellow man’s burden. Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we have treated him. . . “

In a footnote (“Believe it or not . . . “) Vidal feigns innocent astonishment at the furor created by this passage, in which every word is teasingly trailed under the noses of the PC crowd, as sodomite was trailed under the noses of the blue-rinses. Bite, suckers! They bit.

His taste for schoolboy hazing, his love of the swash and buckle of debate (“It’s savory scholar-squirrel stew time again!” he announces with horrid relish, as he prepares to boil alive a brace of historians who have found fault with his novel, “Lincoln”), have tended to marginalize Vidal as merely outrageous --the word that has come to haunt him. “He can’t be serious . . . “ says the luncheon clubber with a pleasurably appalled giggle--and those who treasure Vidal for his sanity in a silly world may wish that his high spirits were sometimes a little more repressible.

For he is at heart a more serious writer than the dozens of solemn preachers and tipsters whose work is discussed across the nation with an earnestness never accorded to that of Gore Vidal. His gloriously funny tirades against the various hacks of academe spring from the conviction that there has been a shameful treason-of-the-clerks by literary intellectuals in the United States. He stands for the proud tradition in which the imaginative writer has a place of honor at the table of the big bad world of politics, money, manners and morals. In Vidal’s work, cultivated worldliness is the order of the day, and he is our best example of the chastening power of a truly free-lance intelligence on the loose among the specialists.

Defending the novel as the civilized and civilizing secular entertainment, wrangling with Jefferson, the Adamses, Lincoln, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, as if they were his obstreperous contemporaries, speaking out for the right of the individual to share his or her bed with whomsoever he or she pleases, damning religion (“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism . . . “), Vidal is fearless and cogent. He writes of himself as a “born-again atheist.” It’s a telling phrase, for he believes in reason (and reason’s bright child, wit) with something closely akin to religious fervor: denouncing the Puritan sky-god, he sounds eerily like Cotton Mather reincarnated with a magnificently un-Puritan sense of humor.

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United States: Essays, 1952-1992 Hardcover – 1 Aug. 1993

• Print length 1295 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Inc
• Publication date 1 Aug. 1993
• Dimensions 16.51 x 6.99 x 24.13 cm
• ISBN-10 0679414894
• ISBN-13 978-0679414896
• See all details

Product description

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Inc; 1st edition (1 Aug. 1993)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1295 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679414894
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679414896
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 6.99 x 24.13 cm
• 26,112 in Poetry & Drama Criticism
• 271,580 in Society, Politics & Philosophy

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.

Photo by David Shankbone (Photographer's blog post about the photo and event) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Reading • The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

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United States: Essays 1952-1992 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams, and Anais Nin.

The essays that appear in this work were originally published in Architectural Digest, Book Week, Commentary, Encounter, Esquire, London Sunday Telegraph, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, New World Writing, The Observer, Partisan Review, Playboy, The Reporter, The Threepenny Review, The Times, Times Literary Supplement, Vanity Fair, and Zero . "Paul Bowles's Stories" was originally published as the Introduction to Collected Stories of Paul Bowles (Black Sparrow Press, 1983). "H. L. Mencken the Journalist" was originally published as the Foreword to The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories edited by Elizabeth Rodgers (Doubleday/Anchor Books).

• Listening Length 60 hours and 15 minutes
• Author Gore Vidal
• Narrator Jeff Cummings
• Audible release date December 31, 2019
• Language English
• Publisher Brilliance Audio
• ASIN B07ZZGVY1P
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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