Customer Reviews (3)

Romulus
Great book! A reflection on decline and fall of empires and civilizations, written immediately after the II WW, with a persistent thought on the decline of the European society. Gore Vidal's translation in English is absolutely wonderful!

One of his best things
Very interesting author - just read i

Romulus is not to be missed
Romulus is one of the biggest hits of this sardonic Swiss playwright and novelist. Known in the USA only for The Viisit and the Physicists, Durrenmatt is one of this century's most brilliant theatrical lights. His works are informed by sardonic humor, beautiful language, intriguing plot twists, high suspense (he pot-boiled murder mysteries)and political insight. His essays are also interesting. Anything by him is going to be a good read. ... Read more

Product Description
"Wicked and provocative...Vidal's purview of Hollywood in one of its golden ages is fascinating." —Chicago Tribune

In his brilliant and dazzling new novel, Gore Vidal sweeps us into one of the most fascinating periods of American political and social change. The time is 1917. In Washington, President Wilson is about to lead the United States into the Great War. In California, a new industry is born that will transform America: moving pictures. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics, from Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the author's own grandfather, the blind Senator Gore. With Hollywood, Vidal once again proves himself a superb storyteller and a perceptive chronicler of human nature's endless deceptions.


From the Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Generally solid entry in the series, albeit with some missed opportunities
Gore Vidal's Empire series is pretty much the best thing ever to happen to American historical fiction, and his style alone makes anything of his catalog readable. Readers will no doubt notice that this is the sort of prelude to a critique of someone you admire, and this is indeed what it is. Hollywood, Vidal's fifth book in the Empire series, qualifies as one of the lower points in a series that has seen nearly unimaginable highs, but this entry often feels more erudite than inspired, and more harping than insightful.

This being said, there's much to like in this book. It roughly covers the second Wilson Administration, as well as the Harding years, and ends shortly after Harding's death. I thought that the political elements of the book are strong--Vidal has always had an uncanny knack for getting in the heads of powerful men, and rendering to life forgotten figures like Harding and Harry Daugherty is admirable and invaluable. Even more appreciated is Vidal's focus on important women--the second Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Harding both provide vivid presences, just as poor old Mrs. McKinley in Empire. Vidal's characterization in this book is a little spotty at times, but there's lots of good stuff to be had here: Harding's arc, in particular, is a fascinating look at how power can change a fundamentally good man, and there's a thoroughly-covered convention scene that has Vidal running on all cylinders. There's also the rise and fall (mostly fall) of Woodrow Wilson, who is blessedly complicated here as a man of genuine idealism as well as incredible pigheadedness and ambition. Other political notables, like Theodore Roosevelt, make appearances. I've always been amused by Vidal's dark--and evidently accurate--take on Teddy, whose enduring popularity mostly proves that not only are elections popularity contests, but so are historical appraisals. How else could Andrew Jackson find himself anywhere near the top of any lists of presidential historical rankings?

So, that's all well and good. But much of this book is given over to a main plot about Caroline Sanford moving to Southern California and becoming something of a minor screen star in silent pictures, having random encounters with contemporaneous film industry notables, engaging in some affairs, etc. This story isn't followed through quite as nicely as one would have hoped. The story fundamentally lacks dramatic tension, the observations aren't quite fresh enough to count as insightful (really, if stars using drugs and "political" films being whitewashed of any controversy to avoid angering the powers that be are revelations to you, you should pay a little more attention) and while he makes some good narrative argumentation about the importance of movies, there's not much tension in this storyline. Even a murder subplot at the end of the novel can't quite make the material sing (though I echo the official Amazon review--the bathhouse scene is pretty amazing).

In any event, Vidal still has a pretty high batting average when it comes to American historical fiction, despite some of the less compelling material here. Vidal fans will find much to like, but when one thinks of what Vidal could have made of the movie business and what kind of stories could have been told about it, it just seems like we should expect more from such a legend. And if you're new to Vidal's work, it's probably best to start with Burr or Lincoln.

Hollywood by Gore Vidal
With an absolute grip on detail, Gore Vidal describes an era: the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding. Vidal's storytelling skills are venerable, however, the text often reads like a stream of consciousness rather than one marked by satisfying conclusions on his characters' actions. Rather than being swept up in the narrative, I kept getting lost in the vast number of characters introduced. Vidal's incisive wit seems to have been tempered by age to the point of blandness at times.. Hearst, Hollywood, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt drift through the pages without bringing impact to the story.
I still love anything Vidal writes, but this book disappointed me.
Judith Clancy
Kyoto, Japan

Movies Are Us
The first scene is grand, with William Hearst's bulk shattering an antique chair and dropping to the thick Persian rug. The place to be now is Hollywood, says early 20th century media mogul Hearst as he bids good-by to his host and owner of the demolished Biedermeier chair, Blaise Sanford. Unlike Hearst, Washington newspaper publisher Sanford is fictional.

But it's the second scene that starts the more mesmerizing narrative thread. Madame Marcia conducts a séance for Mrs. Harding and Jesse Smith--the Hardings' Ohio friend, owner of a dry goods emporium, a dewy-eyed political groupie and an unofficiallobbyist-government contractor of sorts. Poor Jess suffers from diabetes and sees ghosts.

The shadows on the screens merge with shadows in Washington as power shapes the manufacturing of screen fantasies and conversely the making of fantasies leads to power. The wonderful movie, Wag the Dog, is many decades in the future. But as Gore Vidal presents it, the 1920s is when politics became integrated with moving pictures and the latter took over the world.

What's so wonderful, says Hearst, is that all over the world the illiterate masses are watching my Pauline. His Pauline keeps moving on the screen because otherwise the audience might move out of the theater. This vivid depiction of Hearst stays close to the real man while making his foray into the movies the emblem of a society increasingly ruled by the image.

But Hearst is a side character. President Harding, Sanford, his sister Caroline, Senator Burden Day and blind Senator Thomas Gore--quite a cast. But it's Jess who's truly unforgettable.

At the end of the book, the shadows and ghouls get Jess, in a manner of speaking. As the reader wonders how he could have committed suicide by shooting himself on the left side of his head when he is right handed, all kinds of recent events involving lobbyists, lawyers, contractors, wars and sex in the oval office come to mind. Vidal is a master in bringing the distant past alive in a way that helps you think about the recent past and the present.

The whole perhaps does not match the brilliance of some of the parts, but this historical novel, and indeed the series of five novels that starts with Burr and ends with Hollywood, are a must read for anyone who wants to understand America. And if you have any thoughts of what exactly happened to Jess, I'd love to hear.

More cabal intrigue than cinematic history
This book provides several leitmotifs from the perspectives of several major fictional characters (Caroline Sanford, Blaise Sanford, and James Burden Day) that easily intermingle with the era's most historical non-fictional figures. With uncanny serendipity, each fictional character is able to find themselves engaged with every major political player at the exact moment they are making a major international decision. As there is no real historical figure to personify the influence of Hollywood on global politics, only Vidal's historical fiction can investigate the connection. His main character, Caroline Sanford, a.k.a. Emma Traxler, has an impossibly rich life transgresses the boundaries of American socialite, newspaper mogul and movie starlet. All while raising an illegitimate daughter and having affairs with America's most powerful men (two directors and a senator). Wow! What a woman!



The story covers the transition from the pre-World War I presidency of Woodrow Wilson through the convoluted election of his successor, Warren Gamaliel Harding. As the Presbyterian Minster turned History Professor turned quixotic dictator, Woodrow Wilson, personifies utopian ideals of "peace without victory" and "League of Nations" while insulating himself personally from Americans. Wilson is the main non-fictional character of the book, but is neither portrayed as a villain or hero. He is an apparent victim; a man with vision and ideals, but unable to navigate the ruthless power struggles with Teddy Roosevelt nor the recent Republican majorities of the congress and senate. The League of Nations becomes a logomachy for the political advancement among party power brokers rather than a realistic foreign policy. The 1920 presidential campaign was characterized less by the stature of the candidates who ran but by the stature of those who could not run (Teddy Roosevelt -died suddenly; Woodrow Wilson - stroke). Warren Gamaliel Harding is, at best, the third most popular candidate in the 1920 Republican Primary. He is the ideal "middle of the road candidate" who prefers the sports pages to the editorials election and is addicted to chewing tobacco. As everyone's second favorite, he is able to slip past two more popular candidates at the republican convention, then easily pass an unsupported democratic candidate, who never has a chance because Woodrow Wilson refuses to pull out of the race, despite his physical and mental incapacities. An appreciation I have for Vidal is that he dispels the myth that political futility has only occurred in the last twenty years. Through his American Chronicles Series, he truly illustrates that politicians since George Washington have been caught in the organization of government and have found themselves spinning their myriad wheels frantically in the mud, going no where. Self-promotion, deception and manipulation were as prevalent for the founding fathers and their rowdy successors as they are today.



However, the common focus of the book is the examining a fledgling American Empire that is bent on expanding its capitalist markets while professing democratic demagoguery. For Vidal, America's top export is its military. Despite an isolationist bent and fear of foreign entanglements, America is a burgeoning market looking to expand. Although the League of Nations makes rational sense and had supporters on both the Republican and Democratic parties, it was implausible because "Americans are too used to going alone in the world. You're also at the start of your own empire, and no rising empire wants to commit itself to peace when there are still so many profitable wars to fight (p. 119)." Hence an ongoing theme for Vidal: ongoing demagoguery for democracy while implementing militant actions with the intent of enriching the nation. Not so coincidently, the term "gilded" is ubiquitous in a not so subtle illusion to Mark Twain's "Gilded Age." America is a world power with a perceivably dominant military, but still a neophyte to the international power business and the American citizenry is largely folksy, ignorant and superstitious. Vidal further points out the hypocrisy of America's "freedom" while implementing quasi-fascist legislation including the Espionage Act, Prohibition and Selective Service. There has always been tension in America between individual rights and the common good; however, the decisions about "common good" usually come at the leisure and advantage of the reigning political elite.



In his elitist style, all decisions are made by an exclusive star chamber of the rich and educated social superiors. As in past novels, senatorial cabals interplay with corrupt Party power-brokers to create historical events. For Vidal, "the American voters" act as a singular player; a pawn moving at the whim of the newspapers and politicians. Often, Vidal portrays the intent of American politicians as being as much to deceive the American voters as our enemies. For example, the Committee on Public Information was established to propagandize for the war. In this vein, Hollywood is introduced and becomes a new national player. The few small towns on the west coast become influential in international politics as the wealthy (William Randolph Hearst) and powerful (Colonel George Creel) discover that if Americans can be easily influenced by what is on the printed page, then they will be exponentially seduced by what they see on the silver screen. Vidal connects the celebrity endorsements of Liberty Bonds, which predominantly funded the effort for World War I, with the propaganda movies that vilified international enemies; first, the "Huns" of Germany, then, the "Reds" of Russia.



I would warn readers that this is first and foremost a novel of historical fiction based primarily on the political events of 1917 through 1920. If you are primarily interested in the industry of Hollywood during that era, I would recommend looking elsewhere. Hollywood is merely a tangential player in the novel "Hollywood" in that the fledgling industry propagates the political manipulation of the masses. Actors, actresses, directors and studio moguls of the times are mentioned but are not primary players. For example, Vidal provides a great monologue of Charlie Chaplin as he flits through various characters in a Robin Williams-esque manner. However, smoke filled meetings of strategizing senators are the scenes of climatic intrigue, not the dynamics of a growing silver screen industry.

brings period to life, evoking feelings and exploring the ideas
This is unquestionably one of the best of Vidal's longitudinal series on the governing classes of the US.While the cover is something of a double misnomer - Hollywood is more of a theme than the plot and it barely gets into the 20s - the book offers a deep and hilarious view of what was going on in the period.You feel what it was like (for some of the monied elite) to be there as witnesses and occasionally shapers of events, which is the essence of successful historical fiction, making the reader curious to look to history books for greater detail and analyis.Indeed, I found this volume to be Vidal's most subtle since Lincoln, full of themes and concepts that fascinate and titillate.It is often difficult to know where Vidal stands, at least for me, and that is a big part of the fun.

In addition to the usual characters of the Sanford sibs and Sen. Day, at the center of the novel is Woodrow Wilson.You watch his decline, at once political - he loses his grip on the nation's political imagination with WWI and then the wrangle over the League of Nations - and physical.While he was indeed a messianic idealist, Vidal also creates a very human portrait of him that I read as sympathetic and, while typicallysarcastic, almost entirely lacking in vidalian cynicism.You get Wilson's vision of the future as well, which events were surpassing as he dug in his heals, pointing directly to WWII.The nation at war, with all of the moral principles so blithely thrown about, also appeared to me as a prescient evocation of a key part of the American character, its narcissistic belief in the face of contrary evidence that it always acts for a righteous cause on the good guys side - just look at the current war in Iraq!More particularly, Vidal portrays the repression of free speech and the blatant hypocracy in light of our stated constitutional ideals.

But there is also WG Harding and his courtiers, who added up to a disastrous mix of executive inattention and the crudest corruption, complete with murdered scapegoats.This too is a huge part of the American system, the desire to let things go and seek the good life while the rats are chewing out the bottom of the barrel.Sound familar?Again, it seems so prescient.

Lastly, there is a taste of the power that Hollywood was becoming. This was the most unexpected part for me, as I am a hardened political junkie and quite ignorent of this part of American culture.Essentially, Vidal questions whether the incipient movie moguls' vision - that of shaping the dreams of the American psyche - will become more important than the shenanigans going on in Wash, DC.As such, his characters see a progression from politicians telling people what to believe, through Hearst's yellow journalism evoking what they should fear, to the far deeper tappng into the public's collective unconscious.That Vidal succeeds in getting a person as jaded as I am to take a new look at so many things is indeed a feat.

Recommended as one of the best of the series.Now that I have read them all, I feel I must go back through the entire series to see more subtle linkages.This series is a wonderful experiment in a new style of hyper novel. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (32)

Please read by any means necessary
Please read this book...Our nation is slipping away and it may already be too late to save our republic!

Imperial America
As Bill Mayer said, 'Gore Vidal' is one of the most fasinating men in America.This book is very education.

Gore Vidal is on Target! One of the most adroit historians today:
Many people have accused Gore Vidal of being anti-American, but this simply isn't the case. To criticize your country for its vitriolic misdeeds and shortcomings is what truly makes you a patriot.
For example: if you suspect George W. Bush has committed treason and he should have been punished for his administrations crimes on 9/11 then you should have the right to state your position on the matter and not be censored or ostracized for it.

Pointing out the insalubrious nature in our government is what facilitates our constitutional rights, while keeping our government and nation on par with national and international laws. Gore Vidal demonstrates this throughout this dictum.

Vidal criticizes Bush's asinine yet precarious environmental initiatives, and his antiquated proposals on controlling the AIDS virus in Kenya (in other words Bush thought if they ceased having sex (aka abstinence) all would be right in Africa.)

Vidal also alludes to the Diebold voter fraud and Bush's "Help America Vote Act," which in itself was a fraud. Nevertheless, if you read Greg Palast "Armed Mad House" you'll get a clearer picture of how Choice Point and Diebold rigged the elections of 2000, 2004, and the Mexican election of 2006.

Anyway, in Chapter Three, Vidal states, "On September 16, 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire was as dead, theoretically, as its predecessor, the British." So what's transpiring now is that for America to stay relevant in the world market, wars without end have to be invoked. According to Vidal, Albert Einstein said, "The men (the elites) who possess real power in the country have no intention of ending the Cold War." Vidal then adds, "Thirty-five years later they are still at it, making money, while the nation itself declines to eleventh place in world per-capita income, to forty-sixth place in literacy and so on." Furthermore, "the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that looked to be the end of our empire."

Much of Vidal's diatribe/transcript was written in the 1980's and much of it is about Reagan policies and he sums up the 2004 presidential electoral race and what he ascertains the conclusion will be.
Overall, this political science book is dated, but there's a litany of history, which is pedagogically significant and will interconnect many other books that fall into this syllogistic line of contemplation. The only thing lacking in this book are notes, so I suggest investigating his sources elsewhere. Moreover, Vidal is very witty, while extremely funny with his Wellerisms, and is the proverbial cynic of the millennium.

Vidal makes a good case for his ethical views.

Bottom Line:'...a MUST READ for patriotic Americans...'
This is an outstanding book from an insightful and wise author.It should be required reading for all Americans.Recommend also:'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace' and 'Decline and Fall of the American Empire (The Real Story Series)' ...both by Gore Vidal.Also, see the documentary film 'Why We Fight'.

A Real Patriot
Mr. Gore has an in depth and uncanny view of American Politics and he is right on.Would that we could have leaders such as Mr. Gore running the Country.I can only dream of what could have been while I suffer the ineptitude and greed of modern day politicians.We need more like Mr. Gore who can stir the masses and demand change. ... Read more

Product Description
Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers.

To most Americans, Abraham Lincoln is a monolithic figure, the Great Emancipator and Savior of the Union, beloved by all. In Gore Vidal's Lincoln we meet Lincoln the man and Lincoln the political animal, the president who entered a besieged capital where most of the population supported the South and where even those favoring the Union had serious doubts that the man from Illinois could save it. Far from steadfast in his abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln agonizes over the best course of action and comes to his great decision only when all else seems to fail. As the Civil War ravages his nation, Lincoln must face deep personal turmoil, the loss of his dearest son, and the harangues of a wife seen as a traitor for her Southern connections. Brilliantly conceived, masterfully executed, Gore Vidal's Lincoln allows the man to breathe again.


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Cannot Rate What Isn't Delivered!
My purchase of Gore Vidal's "Lincoln" never arrived from International Books. Ordered by credt card on 4/20/09, there was no problem with the quick processing of my payment, but the book did not arrive by the latest delivery date (5/12/09), nor has it reached me through 5/20/09. All I've received from the seller, so far, are two "be patient" messages to two e-mails of inquiry. Yesterday International Books wrote that they "will not be able to issue you a refund unless the book is returned to us."

I am very unhappy over this experience. Looks like I won't be ordering any fairly rare items over Amazon in the future. I cannot afford to pay for products that cannot be sent surely, promptly, and by guaranteed delivery. If I had been given the choice of a "NO-STAR" rating on this transaction, that's what I would have listed above.

Sincerely,

Bill McCurdy

This is the best book on Lincoln I've ever read.
People who prefer their presidents -- especially the "great" ones -- wreathed in hagiographical haloes had better look elsewhere for a view of the president who re-founded the United States.Vidal's portrait of this most interesting (and, given the sum of his achievements, our greatest) president accurately renders the Lincoln that I have come to know through a close reading of many of "Father Abraham's" own writings.

That being the case, be forewarned that this novel came under fire from the academics who, having failed in their self-appointed task of shaping American history to fit their own political agendas, sought to discredit an artist who took Lincoln as he (and the historical record) found him.(For a complete discussion of this controversy from Vidal's perspective, see his wonderfully entertaining "United States.")

From Lincoln's 1838 address to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield (when he spoke of ambitious men who would eschew the path laid out by the country's founders, in order to carve for themselves an equal or higher niche in the pantheon of fame, whether it be by freeing the slaves or enslaving free men), to his farewell address to his fellow citizens of Springfield, we have historical evidence that this was a man with his eye on more than just a political office.So much so that one fair interpretation (such as Vidal's) could be that he did (and said, especially in his "House Divided" speech) more than a little of his own to bring on our nation's bloodiest war.

This kind of thinking, of course, does seem to rattle the hagiogaphers of the Ken Burns school, who would have us think that the Civil War was about slavery.Period.End of sentence. End of thought.

About slavery it certainly was;but there were other issues (labor and capitalism,for instance)that, for a variety of reasons, the hagiographers do not touch.Is it because by raising the question of "slaves without masters," to quote the pro-slavery apologi! st George Fitzhugh's critique of Northern capitalism, we remind ourselves of the very precarious economic world that we still inhabit, a world that the South fought to keep at bay as long as it could?To keep from asking such questions, modern-day mandrakes endeavor to divert our attention from the hard questions raised by the Civil War (and by Lincoln's own conduct and words) and keep our vision focused on the horrors of slavery, and the sainthood of the man responsible for ending it.

Abraham Lincoln deserves his due as a great man, a great president, and a genius to boot.He did indeed supplant Washington in our minds, and it is fitting that he did: for the Old Republic that people thought they were getting in the time of Washington is no more.Perhaps it was inevitable that it died;certainly it is true that a polity based upon human exploitation and bias towards the big money men deserves to die.But that raises the question of what we have got in return.This book is a magnificent portrait of the man who, for better or for worse, ushered in the new ages of gild, industrialism, and imperialism, the ages that, as Gideon Welles said upon his death, he now belongs. ... Read more

Product Description
POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION refers to a form of navigation Gore Vidal resorted to as a first mate in the navy during World War II. As he says, 'As I was writing this account of my life and times since PALIMPSEST, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.'It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards (mostly) eludedduring his eventful life. From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society, where he has cut a broad swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book's most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

TO THE POINT OF GENIUS!
Gore Vidal makes many fascinating points in POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION that I believe all can identify with on our journey to the grave. I bought the complete audio version of this book because I feel the emotion in Mr Vidal's voice, though he keeps it veiled in a professional, human warmth that listeners of audio books most appreciate. I admire him for speaking his mind whether others like it or not. His brilliance, experience and genius have long inspired my respect for him. The detailed death of his true love, after the great many years and experiences they shared, moved me not only to tears but to face the fact that there is no escaping the inevitable. I'm also reminded how young we remain within our bodies chained to time. Of all Gore Vidal's works, many of which I am a fan, this is the one that lets you in. If it is true that one can only respect others as much as one respects one's self, then I feel my self-respect has evolved through the experiences and deep insights shared by Gore Vidal in his points of navigation. He has stirred my emotions, stimulated my intellect, and awakened me through this profound book. I urge all to absorb the wisdom of a man who knows more about life -- not to mention the hidden side of those in power controlling life -- than any writer of our era. Apart from my standing ovation for POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION, I must admit to the sorrow I feel over our dilemma on this dying planet. I guess Mr Vidal really got under my skin with things he left unsaid because of being too sad to say. I wish we could all value each other as if we were a close family stuck on a sinking ship. I wish we could throw the gold overboard in favor of prolonging as many lives as possible. Another human in your arms must feel better than the loneliness of an award or riches. Through listening to Gore Vidal, I feel embraced by someone who knows. We're all in this together. Whatever faults we may find in others originate in our own mind and can be replaced with those better thoughts we have that make what's left of life worth living. Consider this review as another point in a navigation that involves each of us. Bravo, Gore Vidal! ... Read more

Product Description
The author of Myra Breckenridge reminisces about his life, from his school days at St. Albans and Exeter to his rise as a literary superstar, and the famous people he has known, including the Kennedys, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Reprint.Amazon.com Review
A candid memoir of Vidal's first 40 years of life. His famous skills as a raconteur, his forthrightness,and his wicked wit are brilliantly at work in these recollections of adifficult family, talented friends, and interesting enemies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (47)

Cyrus Spitama Pays Back
This is a very difficult work to rate. Looking at the previous ratings makes that abundantly clear.

Attempting to rate it, i discovered that there are quite a few different ways of being objective. What f stop will you use, which apperture?, will you use filters?

I read this books only once and will not do so again, although i may refer to it because it has a useful if inadequate index. On the other hand, i read "Creation" three times, "Julian" and "Myra Breckenridge" twice. This is because the subject of Gore Vidal as lived by Cyrus Spitama is not as exciting as the subject of Cyrus Spitama as remembered by Gore Vidal.

However, the memoir has such redeeming features that it is difficult to give it a low rating. It is very well written. Despite some previous reviews, the language is not arrogant and should not require a dictionary. It is the man himself who is arrogant.

The times were interesting times for those of us who lived all or a portion of them and for some historians and even for some tabloids to dig up juicy ante-modern gossip.

You are not really concerned with what happens next when reading it, nor do you find the scarcity of empathy and lack of spontaneity pleasant. The inteligent wit is well thought out but lacks the humor of a person who can laugh at himself.

Yet, the words and the sentences flow. You feel removed from any feelings of compassion yourself. It is more of a motion picture which you continue to watch without much of a thought in your mind.

After it is over, you may have discovered certain facts and info you did not know, but you will not feel sad, or happy, or joyful, or satisfied or unsatisfied. You will go back to what you usually do. Yet, you will probably sit through the whole thing, occasionally asking yourself, "Why am i doing this?"

I do not think i would like to have met him. I also believe that he would not have liked to have met me. I wonder if he ever thought of himself as an outsider-cum-arrogant insider-cum-parasitein the American Palace and Harem as Cyrus refused to divulge to us. The aristocracy is so different in different cultures and environments. Yet, the people who are nurtured and tortured by them are rather similar. I know because Mr. Vidal took me to 445 BC and 1876 and mid Twentieth century, and i have already lived over two hundred years in the Ottoman Empire.

Read this book and some of his other books. You do not have to agree with any of his views regarding anything. You do not have to empathise. But, it is very good writing and if nothing, he is definitely a person of his times, and the times would have been poorer without him.

One of the Best Books I've Ever Read
This book, which I read several years ago, is one of the best I've ever read.Gore Vidal is one of the smartest men to grace this planet.Some would not think so because of his personal life, but Vidal is way beyond that small hindrance in life.He basically sees many people as hypocrites and I tend to agree with him.The book is crammed full of his meetings and crossing paths with the rich and famous, not to mention those at the top of their politiical craft.And he has an uncanny awareness of who people really are in a deep sense.

Here are some quotes from the book:

Just beyond the handsome snow-white Supreme Court building are the streets that look to have been bombed out in some long-ago-lost war.Here live the black majority of the city.Yet the occupants of the Capitol speak mindlessly of democracy and justice and human rights and the free world.

The United States has never had a civilization and so survival is not easy if one goes against the grain of so fiercely superstitious a land.

A conservative is one who serves unquestioningly the wealthy interests that control American life while parroting the official cant of "better dead than Red".Was there ever a fraud greater than this government of, by, and for the people (quoting Lincoln)?What people, which people?--Senator T.P. Gore

Republicans tend to agree with Alexander Hamilton that the rich are wiser and better than the poor and so ought to be allowed to rule the country and do business without popular interference.

I have never thought much of rules arbitrarily imposed on me by others for their convenience.

Dr. Kinsey was intrigued by my lack of sexual guilt.I told him that I thought guilt was a middle class disorder from which the power people seem exempt.

Gore has had a rich and interesting life, and in this book, he shares that with us.

His insights into the human condition are legend.I've done more highlighting and re-reading passages in this book than any other.I simply couldn't put it down.I'm aware that some people don't like Gore, probably because they find in him things they don't like about themselves.

But, he has always lived his life his way without regard to how others may see him.And for that, I find he has more guts, more awareness and a real sense of the purpose of life.How many of us can say that?

Entertaining memoir - but a little long...
I enjoyed "Palimpsest," Gore Vidal's memoir of his young life. It is an entertaining look at a time in this country's history when it was possible to have the type of life that Gore lived.He easily traversed several worlds, sometimes simultaneously: Local and national politics, Broadway, Hollywood, novelist and essayist, and WWII veteran.

The most moving portions of this memoir are Vidal's recollections of a young man he had loved who was killed in WWII.Vidal is able to provide a glimpse into raw intimacy between two men who loved each other without necessarily defining themselves as homosexual.The most historically interesting sections are devoted to John and Jackie Kennedy; Vidal was related by marriage to Jackie Kennedy and their mutual interests and intelligence allowed their lives to intersect both before and during John Kennedy's presidency.Out of all of the reading I have done on the Kennedys, I think that Vidal's description of John Kennedy riding in a limosine with Jackie and Vidal provides the most vivid description of what he was like as a human being.

I think that the book could have been made even more effective had it been treated to aggressive editing.At least 60 - 75 pages could have been excised without diminishing it.Still, for a glimpse at a period of history and the musings of a singular individual who witnessed the movers and shakers up close and intimately, "Palimpsest" is an admirable and worthwhile effort.

A love story. Rest in peace, Jimmie Trimble
I doubt anyone could be farther from my political leanings than Gore Vidal but I find his writing to be a joy.I have only begun reading Gore, and have not yet read his novels. After being ostracized by East Coast media after his first novel, he survived by writing for theater, television, and film: it is amazing how much he has written and most of us are probably unaware of it. Example: he was an uncredited writer for one of my favorite movies as an adolescent: Ben-Hur.

His collection of essays ("United States") led me to his memoirs, perhaps one of the best in this genre.

It has been said, and Gore himself seems to suggest it, that he knew everyone in the 1960's and although he was related through marriage to the Kennedys and often lived within their circle -- especially Jackie's -- he appears not to have exploited that relationship. I could be wrong.Regardless, he did break with the Kennedys in the end.

But what impressed me most was the story within the story: a memoir, yes, but as he himself said, a love story.He was never able to get over the love of his life, Jimmie Trimble, killed at Iwo Jima. Gore's memoir is sentimental without being sentimental.

[The photographs of Anais Nin are precious.They alone are worth the price of the book.]

The Scandalous, Opinionated, & Touching Recollections of an American Man of Letters.
Gore Vidal is careful to call "Palimpsest" a "memoir", not an "autobiography". These are the first 39 years of his life as he remembers them -in more ways than one. His memories are not in chronological order, but start with his half-sister's wedding in 1957 and bounce around, through his childhood, youth, his family, politics, acquaintances, sex life, and writing career, sometimes doubling back on itself or jumping to the present in Ravello, Italy 1993-1994. "Palimpsest" is a perfect title, as it describes what memoirists do, consciously or unconsciously, literally and figuratively: They overwrite the past. Vidal alerts us to his palimpsests whenever he discards what he previously wrote.

Though the gist of Vidal's political progression leftward from reactionary youth to socialist to vehement anti-interventionist comes across, "Palimpsest" is not about politics. It's about people: the author and those who most shaped his experiences. Among them were: Dr. Alfred Kinsey, Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams, John and Jacqueline Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, and Paul Bowles. The grandson of Senator T.P. Gore, Vidal moved in aristocratic, artistic, and political circles. He was well-connected, to say the least, and he offers interesting tidbits about the people he met and the conclusions he drew. He says next to nothing about his companion of 44 years, Howard Auster.

The "unfinished business" of a youthful love affair with a man who died at Iwo Jima and The Kennedys are overriding themes -though it is difficult to know if Vidal speaks so much of the Kennedys because they are the public's preoccupation or his own. The persistent memory of Jimmie is both surprising and moving, a reminder of how our youth, especially things left undone, haunts us. Some readers will be turned off either by Vidal's social mores or by his heretical politics. I would simply say about his lifestyle that he is not middle class. I don't always agree with his politics, but I have to give him credit for judging his friends even more harshly than his enemies. Gore Vidal is astute about people, if not politics, and he's a superb wordsmith. I thoroughly enjoyed "Palimpsest". ... Read more

Product Description
Twentieth-century television networks compete murderously for exclusive rights to broadcast the Crucifixion, in an irreverent assault on religious, sexual, and commercial mores by the author of Lincoln. Reprint. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo. NYT. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Thoughtful satire
Vidal here turns his 'serious' discussion of things religious in "Julian" and "Creation" to high satire.If you liked the Python movie "The Life of Brian" you'll probably appreciate this.

Some knowledge of the New Testament, the doctrinal disputes in the early church - the literal iota's worth of difference between the Anasthasian and Arian factions in the early church (You're probably an Anasthasian unless you belong to the LDS Church or Jehovah's Witnesses.) - and the sometimes bizarre and byzantine theological arguments from - well, the Byzantine Christians themselves - and later from the Mormons and the Scientologists, will certainly add to the enjoyment.Along the way, Vidal also satirizes us moderns and our dependance on the media for "truth".

I do not view this as irreverant (or at least not as irreverant to those who do not presume too much beyond our knowledge) but rather an attempt to strip away illusion.Trivially, was Jesus grossly obese, as Vidal imagines, or was he the image of the nordic Max von Sydow in the Hollywood version of the "Greatest Story Ever Told"? (And, would that really matter?)To those who may find this blasphemy, I can only quote from Goethe's "Faust":

"Wer immer strebend sich bemueht,
Den koennen wir erloesen..."

and perhaps from the "Good Book" itself:"Tis estin aletheia?"("What is truth?")

A Great Read

This book had me laughing from the time I started until I put it down. If you are not insecure or uptight about your Christian beliefs this book will put a smile on your face that will last all day. This would make a great movie - SciFi Network.

Live from Golgotha
Were I not aware that "the name is not the thing," I would think that the author of this silly, puerile book is the same Gore Vidal who penned brilliant novels like "Julian" or "Creation." This book is sometimes entertaining, so this Gore Vidal does have some potential. Maybe he could look up the *other* Gore Vidal and get some pointers.

Very Creative!
I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting when I picked this one up, but I generally enjoy fictional accounts of Christ's life.There wasn't much on the actual life of Jesus, but more of the ministry following his death.The narrator, Timothy, focuses mainly on the life of St. Paul aka Sol aka The Saint.So, Saint fudges a few facts, embellishes his relationship with Christ, has a taste for young men, is in conflict with Jesus' brother James, and annoys the hell out of St. Peter.It is a satirical look at the early church and St. Paul's ministry (he captivates converts by juggling and tap dancing).But add into the mix some time-traveling NBC executives and a hacker erasing Christianity, and you have one Sci-Fi Gospel.It became a bit confusing at times trying to keep people in their proper time contexts, and who played what roll in the grand scheme of things.The end definitely has a twist, history is changed, humanity is saved, and Jesus isn't entirely who we think he is.

If you're expecting something more profound, I suggest you read Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son."If you want rolling-on-the-floor-clutching-your-stomach hilarity, pick up "Lamb" by Christopher Moore.However, Vidal delivers a very creative spin on the greatest story ever told... And what follows.

Truly funny, truly insightful
Largely pilloried by the mainstream critics, Live from Golgotha remains one of the finest pieces of satirical blasphemy to come along in the past two decades. A wickedly hilarious story of real imagination from an important, perceptive writer. ... Read more

Product Description
When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Now available in a Penguin Classic edition, Gore Vidal's deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

Another forgotten gem by a master
Well executed book about the rise of a new religion celebrating death which sweeps the globe. Vidal skewers organized religion and the politics that too often twists virtuous ideas into oppressive dogma, and seemingly rational people into homocidal/suicidal fanatics. Published in 1954, this one remains fresh and all to relevant today.

an ominous take on American religiosity
Gore Vidal is a superb writer.He has a way with words that is evocative and beautiful, and in this short novel he takes satiric aim at religion, as undertaker John Cave (and his followers, including our narrator), manage the formation of a new religion.Cavites gradually become more aggressive and more intrusive.The narrator observes this and has misgivings at the time, but it is his perspective from 50 years in the future, when he is exiled and incognito, that haunts the narrative.Very enjoyable.

An Existential Perspective
I recently just finished rereading this novel (having first read it years ago).

Now, I'm no intellectual (and I'm not about to embark on some critical theory bender), but when I first read this novel I thought of in in simple terms, and certainly found it interesting.

I read it now, and realised it was first published in the mid 50s, smack in the middle of the high of Sartre's Existentialism.I couldn't help but think of it as a 'what if Existentialism become a world religion' scenario?

That's all.Just another way to think about the book.

WHERE IS THY STING?
This book was written in the early 1950's, and like any satire it takes its start-point from the world at its time of writing. Great satire, I am coming increasingly to realise, does not fade with the memory of its immediate context because it depicts things that are deep and nasty and recurrent. The tripartite first chapter of Vidal's Messiah sets his real tone with a solemnity that can be mentioned in the same breath as the greatest of all recitatives with which Handel launched a masterpiece by the same name. Read it, if I may suggest, slowly, and take in carefully what it is saying, and after you have finished the book read that first chapter again. Its tone is entirely different from the rest of the book, or at least there are only a few momentary suggestions of that tone later. However the tone is one thing, the manner in which the basic message is suitably presented. The message itself is the thing; and the message is what we, humanity, are doing when we indulge ourselves in `faith'.

If ever a book was a parable for our times in 2008, this book is that. Egotist though he was, I can't imagine that Vidal would have expected to get just this close to what has happened. He was there in the post-war world, the true New American Half-Century itself, the era of the Cold War, before any such expression as New American was thought of, envisaging a world predicted in The Goncourt Journals of 1861 `when all modern nations will adore a sort of American god'. With the end of the cold war it has suddenly stopped looking like this. The sort of American god who invented the cold war and the catechism of questions about who were the goodies and who the baddies, who were trying to Take Over the World and who were correspondingly Defending Freedom, was J Foster Dulles. Relieved of the burden of answering the questions correctly, the rest of the world has gone its own way as it had always wished to do. The One Remaining Superpower is finding itself isolated through assuming without first asking that it will be followed in foreign policy, and economically stretched in consequence. At the same time an unregarded religion that never went through a Reformation has emerged from the shadows in a threatening and unexpected form, part protest against colonialist misprision, but startlingly in this day and age asserting, in some quarters at least, a mission of its own to bring death or conformity of belief to the whole world.

Vidal does not just ask how humanity gets itself into positions like this, he boldly answers the question in his first chapter, and in my opinion he speaks true. Faith fills a vacuum. It outsources our thinking. It speaks to what Housman called `the habit of treading in ruts and trooping in companies that men share with sheep'. What seems to me to have happened, now in 2008, is a neat and astonishingly precise inversion of what Vidal foresaw. V envisaged a secular faith overturning centuries of Christianity: in the event secularism has been caught off-guard by mediaeval certainty, scripture and mantras, while trying to beat back a degenerate Christian version of much the same that persists in its own back yard like bindweed.

The much-despised Oxford linguistic philosophers really have the key to the matter. What is the relationship of faith or belief to `truth'? None, or only accidental. However, capture the vocabulary and you are in the driving seat. Mr K Rove was not the first (by a long way) to know that. Give the scattered sheep something to rally round and, in the right circumstances, they will rally round it. Add an evaluative dimension, a suggestion of right v wrong, then some ad-hoc spicing of treason to the allegations, then an additional appeal to arms for self-defence, and you have a formula for unending wars over nothing whatsoever. The great standard to capture is `Truth', which is a hymn to be sung and only fortuitously connected with anything that might, by rational criteria, be evaluated as `true'. Capture that and your enemies are the votaries of falsehood and lies, so they had better mind out, and thus do we have much of human history.

At the story-level, the focus of the new faith is reminiscent of Waugh's Mr Joyboy, an assistant mortician with the initials J C. The contemplation of cadavera had instilled in him an outreaching sense that the cadavera have it right and that life is a bit of a burden. From this point his teachings advance to near-total domination of the USA, and by the end we don't know how the battle between the death-dedicated USA and the then-presumably-life-centred ROW has it worked out. The book is really a joy to read if you get a few of the references and have some background in Catholicism. The history of the Church and its attitude to `truth', the magnificent architecture painting and music - try rejecting that if you come from where I come from and react to music the way I do - intellectually, it's all bolony. In the 50's `Messiah' was apparently attacked for `blasphemy', that being a kind of lingo that some talked in those pre-elightened times. Whatever (if anything) `blasphemy' means this use of it is not my own idea of offence to the Deity. My idea of staying hopefully on the right side of any putative Creator of an animal race politely described as `intelligent' is not to pretend to speak in His name. Attempts to enrol Him to various American causes I shall avoid for fear of thunderbolts that such insolence is inviting.

Compulsory reading on pain of loss of intellectual status.

Murr on
It is perhaps in this novel more than any of his others that Vidal's voice aligns itself most closely to his protagonist's. Certainly there are the usual Vidalian flashes of mordant wit and the occasional outrage. One of the characters responds thus to the increased number of suicides globally as the new religion takes hold: "There are too many people as it is, and most of them aren't worth the room they take up."

[...]. ... Read more

Product Description
The first paperback edition to combine Gore Vidal's brilliant and energetic fantasy Myra Breckinridge with its sequel, Myron. "A moral masterpiece."--The Times (London) 10,000 print. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

Myra vs. Myron: the ultimate battle of the sexes
Once again out of print, "Myra Breckinridge" is a novel of its time, a post-Lolita send-up of Sixties sexual mores and American hang-ups, with a Swiftian prose meant to shatter the tranquility of tradition. The novel has perhaps lost its edge in a culture that celebrates the movies of John Waters and Gus van Sant and that mourns the death of an androgynous Michael Jackson to an excess once reserved for sexual icons like Elvis and Marilyn. But its underlying spite still has the ability to shock (particularly in the book's most infamous scenes of sadism). And forty years on, the title character--a domineering vixen who invades a film school and disrupts the lives of its patriarchal director and his wholesome if untalented students--hasn't lost her nefarious magnetism, either.

The lesser but still readable sequel, "Myron," while sometimes more focused in its parody, features a lead character who falls into his TV set, lands on the soundstage of the movie he was watching, and finds himself trapped in the summer of 1948. Wordplay and satire aside, the plot device gets a little tiresome but is somewhat redeemed by the twists of the final chapters.

But what does it all mean? The most obvious target of Vidal's satire is the idea of sexual identity. Influenced by the Kinseyian concept of universal bisexuality, Vidal has long argued that notions of sexuality should be applied to actions rather than to persons and (less controversially) that gender identities are fluid constructs that are socially determined rather than intrinsic to character. Such ideas play out in both books. In the first novel, Myra introduces the wholesome, all-American couple Rusty and Mary-Ann to their own suppressed same-sex desires, while in "Myron" sexual inhibitions crumble on the set of a Westworld-like fantasyland where various shades of masculinity are parodied in the characters of "out-of-towners" who resemble Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, and Normal Mailer.

Yet, in both novels, gender identity is just as often an either-or proposition; by presenting extremes of masculinity and femininity, Vidal mocks our obsession with them. Whenever Myra and her "husband" Myron switch roles, Vidal depicts them not as a single person with a fluid identity but as a Sybil-like schizophrenic with separate, stereotypical personalities--a man-hating woman vs. a closeted gay man--battling over a single body. (As Myra boasts, "Certainly my work is superior to that of Joanne Woodward whose performance in 'Three Faces of Eve' is but the palest carbon of my own story.") Myra could never be like Myron, and vice versa--and a battle of the sexes ensues. Several critics have argued that Myra serves as Vidal's mouthpiece, but I'm not so sure: Is Myra's rigid, mad view of sexual politics a burlesque of the past or a vision of the future?

Another theme running through both novels is the circularity of life and art: we model our lives on what we see in the movies (or on television), and Hollywood in turn seeks to depict fantasy-enhanced representations of our lives. In "Myron," Vidal takes this intersection of fact and fiction to its literal extreme; not only do Myra and Myron alter "Siren of Babylon," the book's fictional B-movie, but by changing the film and rescuing the MGM studio from its decline, Myra hopes to prolong the "golden age of the movies" and salvage "everything, in fact, that made America great, that made it possible for our boys to destroy Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo." Vidal has been unsparing in his attacks on the masses, for which "book-reading, never a favorite pastime of the brave at home, has been replaced by Viewing"; the irony here is that few Americans have mastered, retained, and idolized even the lowliest of Golden Age-era movies as thoroughly as he has.

The LSD-fueled zaniness of the plots and Vidal's acidic cultural observations make both novels seem like period pieces with a quasi-sci-fi husk. What may have seemed shocking and wacky and slightly sadistic four decades ago has now been relegated to the trite category of "camp classics," of interest mostly to literary scholars and cultural critics. Vidal blames the decline in these novels' reputation on the (admittedly atrocious) movie made from the first book, but it's not unfair to say that Vidal doeth protest too much. Today his views of sexuality often seem just as quaint and stodgy as those he attacks (as Myra notes of the future, represented by her young students, "sex does not appear to be the hangup with this crowd"). In truth, Vidal's little soda-pop "inventions" (to use his term) lost most of their fizz almost as soon as they were published, but that doesn't make them any less fun to read.

Beast, What Is Thy Sex?
The fact that Gore Vidal's highly original 'Myra Breckinridge' (1968) and its sequel, 'Myron' (1974), have been published together in one edition by Penguin Books strongly suggests that the novels are in the process of becoming accepted as part of the canon of American Literature. This is extraordinary, since 'Myra Breckinridge' is a genuinely radical and subversive novel that strikes forcibly at the very heart of traditional American values, particularly at the country's conservative sexual mores, though most readers seem to miss the 'unacceptable truth' that the book shrewdly exposes. Oddly, the disastrous film version of 1970, presently in constant rotation on multiple cable channels, made the same point more clearly, which was perhaps somewhat responsible for its critical and box office failure.

On the basis of its tone alone, 'Myra Breckinridge' may be difficult for many readers to read comfortably, which was doubtlessly Vidal's intention. Told in first person through a series of journal entries, Myra's often hilarious commentary is a litany of keen perception, self-hatred, sniping mania, arrogant sarcasm, brittle irony, continuous domineering combativeness, and camp-laden neurosis.

Cultural critic Camille Paglia has championed the novel, and as critic Reed Woodhouse has suggested, Myra's voice is often comparable to Paglia at her acerbic, devil-may-care, 'the truth must out' best. As Paglia would also begin to do with the publication of Sexual Personae in 1991, 'Myra Breckinridge' is additionally a scathing attack on the then-untouchable decorous High WASP values and social mores of the first half of the Twentieth Century. The book's genius lies in Vidal's ability to make the reader first sympathize with and then champion the marauding sociopathic Myra, who is a liar, an extortionist, a sadist, a rapist and, ultimately, something of a phantasm.

The unmentionable--and entirely unacceptable--'ugly truth' that the novel subtly declares is that self-identified heterosexual men can, in fact, be converted to full-blown homosexual desire if they can be made to be the passive partner in homosexual intercourse on at least one occasion. Using an artificial phallus, Myra rapes the hyper-masculine but brainless Rusty (whose buttocks she refers to as "a cannibal banquet"), who then abandons his longtime girlfriend, brutally transfers his rage to aging nymphomaniac Letitia Van Allen, and settles into a life of active, willfully chosen homosexuality as the novel closes.

"We are furnaces inside," says Myra, who has introduced Rusty to an internal furnace he hadn't know he had. Thus Myra, "goddess enthroned and all-powerful," has achieved one of her primary goals: "that is woman's role, to make the wound and then heal it." Myra, who has been reborn several times herself, provides Rusty with a reawakening and second birth, one that would very likely never have occurred without her sadistic intervention.

Curiously, Vidal seems to have lost his nerve as the novel draws to a close. Myra is run over by an automobile driven by one of her enemies, awakens badly injured in a hospital, and, via a process never made clear to the reader, psychically reverts back to Myron Breckinridge, the man she was before physically altering genders via an operation in Denmark.

But while the original Myron was an effeminate if sadomasochistic homosexual male, the post-Myra Myron is a docile, heterosexually-identified house-husband married to Rusty's former girlfriend, Mary-Ann. Lifting a syrupy message from The Wizard of Oz (1939), the novel closes with Myron stating that "it is a proven fact that happiness, like the proverbial bluebird, is to be found in your own backyard if you just know where to look."

While Myron's advice, which violates absolutely everything which has come before, is intended to be ironic, it's odd that Vidal chose to brutally punish--and even physically dismember ("where are my breasts?")--social terrorist Myra for her all-out, hubristic assault on American values, beliefs, manners, and gender roles. Perhaps Myra's failure was an inevitability, since her broad goals are consistently inconsistent: while she zealously worships the depiction of manhood and masculinity reflected in Hollywood films of the Thirties and Forties, she simultaneously desires to figuratively but aggressively reduce every man she encounters to a submissive, quivering eunuch, a position which oddly mirrors her own transsexual status. Whether this confusion is Myra's or Vidal's is difficult to assess, but the book's tepid conclusion suggests that Vidal became unexpectedly mired in his theme and simply lost his way.

The unfunny, grossly overlong 'Myron' is more a parody of its predecessor than a genuine thematic sequel, revealing a Vidal even further removed from the first book's disturbing origins and motivators. Here, Myron, who has had radical reconstructive surgery, continues as a mousy heterosexual house-husband living comfortably in the San Fernando Valley circa 1973, where he runs a Chinese catering business and remains happily married to Mary-Ann.

Though Myron hopes to "block out that awful period" of his life, the now repressed Myra struggles to liberate herself and take control of Myron's "mutilated body." To this end, Myra, "the arch-creatrix herself," supernaturally inserts Myron into a telecast of the fictional 'Siren of Babylon,' after which he finds he is "caught inside the movie" while it is being filmed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1948. 'Myron' reduces Myra to the back lot B-movie heroine she has continually threatened to degenerate into.

While 'Myra Breckinridge' has sharp and potentially deadly teeth, 'Myron,' sadly overladen with third-rate, 'naughty' gay camp humor, has none. However, it's likely that admirers of the first book will want to follow the further adventures of Vidal's dangerous, dazzling creation.

Myra, psychotic superhero
I don't like to know too much about a story before i start reading it.This was the case with this book.Not only i had no idea about the subject matter, i didn't even know too much about Gore Vidal.

There was something really strange about the main character, Myra. She was way too arrogant and full of herself.At first, i thought that was due to the writing.What does Gore Vidal know about women? I remember how surprised i was with She's Come Undone.After reading that book, it was hard for me to believe that Wally Lamb is a man!

But this Myra sure was weird.She was recently widowed, and traveled to Hollywood to collect on her husband's inheritance, which until then had been in the hands of Uncle Buck, an old movie star who now ran an acting school.Uncle Buck decides to keep Myra close by while his lawyers investigate her alleged marriage to his nephew, so he offers her a job in the acting school.

Myra keeps a diary which she is planning to share with her shrink back in NYC.While at the school, she becomes obsessed with a very handsome young man and his girlfriend.She in fact starts planning some unclear revenge, with the handsome guy as the victim.

This was one of those novels that kept me entertained even when i wasn't reading it.It was during one of those moments, when i was thinking about a small detail that did not make sense, that i was able to finally figure out what was going on with Myra.And then i smacked my forehead, because it was sort of obvious.

Not for the faint of heart, because there are some XXX moments, but this was a very fun ride.I enjoyed Myra's self-righteousness after a while, as well as the great movie commentaries throughout the book. There were two points that particularly resonated with me:

1: Myra's praise for the commercial as an art form.I love commercials and the incredible creativity they can concentrate in such a few seconds.

2: "But then the pedestrian is not favored hereabouts.In fact, the police are quick to stop and question anyone found on foot in a residential district since it is part of California folklore that only the queer or criminal walk; the good drive cars that fill the air with the foul odor of burning fossils, and so day by day our lungs fill up with the stuff of great ferns and dinosaurs who thus revenge themselves upon their successors, causing us to wither and die prematurely".

And i have just found out that there is a movie based on the book, so bad that is good.

Two unforgettable novels with one amazing, twisted character
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE moves to Hollywood in order to collect the inheritance left by her husband Myron. The one problem is Uncle Buck Loner who stands between her and the property - a profitable school for would be actors run by Buck. Myra is certain that everything will turn out her way, as she is the New American Woman. Every man wants her, but none may have her. However, there is a twist to Myra that will throw her plans into turmoil if anyone finds out.

This is a darkly comic book with one of the most intriguing of characters in Myra Breckinridge. She is self-confidant (perhaps overly so), knows how to control and manipulate both men and women to fulfill her wishes, and determined not to let anything stop her. She is ready to change the world to suit her. In other words, a force to be reckoned with. I also liked that she patterned herself after movie heroines and relates to people as though they were characters in a movie, shown for her benefit.

The novel itself is written as a series of diary entries, written by Myra as events happen. This gives an immediacy to the story and makes the reader feel as though he/she is a part of the action. The twist in the story is definitely a shocking one; I admit that it threw me for a loop. I can only imagine its impact when the book was published in 1968 with the sexual revolution just underway. An incredible book.

MYRON: This sequel to "Myra Breckinridge" follows poor Myron as he battles against Myra, only this time they've somehow become stuck in the 1948 movie "Siren of Babylon." It's a strange world, the Hollywood of 1948, and Myron tries frantically to return to 1973 and his beloved Richard M. Nixon while Myra has plans of her own to both bring back the glory of MG Studios by fixing "Siren" and to curb the human population growth by re-forming man in her image - strong, sterile Amazonian woman. Her one problem: Myron and how to keep him from escaping the film.

It's a totally bizarre and wonderfully campy look at Hollywood of the 1940s but seen through the eyes of the 1970s. And, like its predecessor, is written in journal entries so you're in the action as it happens from the characters' perspectives. A great piece of fantasy fiction.

Most provocative, insightful & hilarious book I ever read
The incomparable Gore Vidal wrote this book in the middle of the sexual revolution of the late sixties.He managed to write a book that is a profound statement on the women's movement on the brink of political madness; revealing the madness of patriarchal society during the Vietnam years while it began to embody the intimate criminal mentality of its enemy at the edge of its success.This book is still, more than thirty-five years later, ahead of its time.Myra Breckinridge is a symbol of America at this tumultuous time--a time that has not only not ended but is being ignored for the benefit of going backward to the Commie-hunter fifties culture, where it is seemingly safe from critical scrutiny. The sexuality, the artistry, the marketplace, the spirituality, and the narcissism that goes from the ridiculous to the sublime--defining the time in which is what written--is all here in this novel, in a way that is not only brilliantly entertaining but non-stop funny.

Vidal was the favorite writer of my baby-boomer parents when I was a child.And like my grandfather, who can tell me all the dirty little secrets of my parents generation without them even being aware, Vidal, with his unmatched artistry and biting wit, reveals all, with a talent for weaving stories that has been unmatched.Who is Myra Breckinridge?A better question would be who ISN'T?

An incredible novel. ... Read more

Product Description
It's 1939, and a teenage math genius is mysteriously summoned to the Smithsonian Institution, where a crash program to develop the atomic bomb is being conducted in the basement. The boy turns out to hold the key to both the secrets of nuclear fission and breakthroughs in the time continuum.As he brainstorms with Robert Oppenheimer, he catches a glimpse of the coming war and becomes determined to ward off the cataclysm. In a race against time-and surrounded by figures from American history past and present, including Albert Einstein, Grover Cleveland, and Abraham Lincoln-he battles to save not just himself, but humanity. Gore Vidal has written some of the finest and most inventive novels in modern times. Readers of such bestsellers as Burr, Lincoln, Duluth, and 1876 will revel in this, his latest foray into the American scene. A brilliant and vividly imaginative tale about some of the key events of the twentieth century, The Smithsonian Institution is a dramatic masterwork of comedy and allusion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

leave all preconceived notions at the door
The secret to enjoying this book is to leave all preconceived notions about narrative form, literary propriety and the space/time continuum at the door of THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. Vidal has built a long and respectable career on such well researched, highly detailed and finely wrought historical novels as JULIAN, LINCOLN, 1876 and EMPIRE, but the imp in him periodically runs off the rails and turns out a MYRA BRECKENRIDGE, a DULUTH ... or this nifty little thing.
The plot follows its own outre inner rules of logic. It involves the mannequins in the Smithsonian's First Ladies exhibit, along with their not-so-dummy husbands; Charles Lindbergh; a seriously cracked Abraham Lincoln (now Curator of Ceramics); and an attempt to change history and head off World War II. It defies further description or condensation.
All those carefully-crafted novels about American political history serve Vidal well here. His Presidents pulse with life and (historically accurate) personality. A confrontation between George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt proves riveting, and Grover Cleveland - one of the book's chief delights - behaves exactly as Grover Cleveland reconstituted as part of a museum exhibit and helping to avert nuclear catastrophe.
Vidal writes for the most part with a cool and polished aloofness -- sardonic rather than impassioned. His sharp, shrewd wit gleams and glints throughout, sometimes with gentle, bemused humor; sometimes like a knife. But he holds strong views about what he terms the `American empire', and he drops the mask of unengaged bystander on one point: the tragic waste of young people killed in war. He makes THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION not merely clever but powerful.
[I am reviewing the unabridged audio cassette edition, read by the excellent Grover Gardner.]

a piece of junk
Sure, if you can get past his stereotypes of Native Americans and other ethnic groups; his homophobia; and his racism; then you might actually enjoy this book.I take that back.Mr. Vidal is so full of himself, so self-conscious of his sentences, that its impossible to focus on the story.He's always smirking and trying to show why he's smarter than someone else.It might be better if he picked up some of the classics and learned a lesson or two.Is he iconoclastic?No, just close minded.

Too Fantastic...Not Enough Substance
The back cover of this book was very misleading. I thought there would be a lot of science and philosophy and thought-provocation. However, I found this book to be contrived and the ending to be obvious. I read Vidal's "1876" and found it very dry until the last 30 pages or so. Those 30 pages made "1876" worth-while reading. This book never had that allure. If Black Holes and the Atomic Bomb interest you, the book "Black Holes and Times Warps" had a better description of both.

Historical Fiction or Science Fiction?
Centering around a main character named T., The Smithsonian Institution is part science fiction and part historical fact.T. is a child blessed with a gift for mathematics, and is enlisted by the government to help with the Manhattan project in the early 1940's.T. soon finds himself immersed in a world of greater fantasy than reality.He is hamming it up with Abe Lincoln, and discussing physics theories with Albert Einstein. As he searches for a way to end the war and create a nuclear bomb, T. finds that stranger things than normal are happening at the Smithsonian. T. soon finds himself consumed with time travel and changing history to stop a war that he knows will have a deadly outcome for himself.Gore Vidal has written a wildly entertaining book but it is not for the unimaginative.The reader must be willing to follow Vidal on his sidetracks and accept whatever strange conclusion they may have without using the historical reality available for judgement.Anyone who enjoys history and science fiction will enjoy this book, as long as it is not looked to for strict historical accuracy.

A metaphor for American History
This book is Vidal comment on the american society and how it came to be - and could be, and it is about presidency and running the country - and overall, quite philosophical and insightful view on the american condition. I think the other reviewers fail to see the depth of the work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.
Although the potential purchaser was cautioned online that this book had no dust jacket, it was still rated by the dealer as in "very good" condition. When the book arrived, it turned out that its spine was cracked from the very top to the very bottom, and the book was barely hanging on to its cover.That's not my idea of "very good" condition.Nor do I think it is the term that most reputable dealer would use. ... Read more

Product Description
'History is gossip,' says a protagonist in Washington, D.C., 'but the trick is determining which gossip is history.' It is a trick that Gore Vidal has mastered in his ongoing chronicle of that circus of opportunism and hypocrisy called American politics and which he plays with renewed vigour in this expose of the nation's capital.Young Clay Overbury, Senator Burden Day's assistant, has both a modest background and immense ambitions. Extremely handsome, oozing charm and seemingly dedicated to the Senator's cause, he is also duplicitous, conniving, and disloyal. But Enid Canford doesn't think so: she marries him, so providing the Sanford newspaper dynasty with a direct line to the Senator. Her father Blaise, at first loathing his son-in-law, later learns to love him - for all the wrong reasons. So begins this tale of lust and ambition set in the Republic's high noon. From the late 1930s to Jo McCarthy's reign of terror, Gore Vidal charts the seamy, sleazy side of Washington. Mixing sober history with nakedly Gothic melodrama, he provides an intoxicating cocktail of blackmail, betrayal, sexual ambivalence, lunacy and conspiracy - or, in a word, politics. ... Read more

Product Description
In the tiny Central American republic of Tenango, a place of orchid-scented jungle, crumbling palaces and baroque cathedrals, the rainy season is over and the dusty days of winter have begun.It is time for revolution.In an old plantation house the conspirators meet: General Jorge Alvarez, returned from exile in New Orleans with his hothead of a son and his proud, beautiful daughter; a volatile entourage of disenchanted colonels and rebel priests; and Peter Nelson, an American soldier of fortune with his own reasons for joining the rebels.Yet when the waiting is over and the struggle for power under way, nothing in Tenango turns out to be what it seems, not even the tragedy that awaits them all. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Boring
Boring from the first go and quite unreadable as you go along few pages - and that's an effort to say the least. Leon Uris would have done a much better job with the same subject matter. I am giving it 3 stars because Vidal exposed the nexus between business and Government in subjugatingdowntrodden people.

The Power That Is In The Hands Of The Few
The political writings of Gore Vidal are timeless.

Originally published in 1950, the novel is set in a mythical South American country that has resources to plunder and a multi-national corporation willing to do the bidding for U.S. government interests. In the mix is the deposed president - who firmly believes that his powerful "friends" will help him and his son regain power - and a former U.S. Army officer with tacit knowledge that a handshake from some is actually a death sentence.

The former president is playing a game that he feels he has the cards to win. It is much too late when he realizes that he was just another puppet on a string who will be remembered as only a footnote in the history of his nation.

Set the scene in another location, tweak the characters a bit and the reader is drawn into yet another conflict that benefits the few, while leaving a bloody trail under the guise of fighting for freedom and democracy.

Unbelievable when written, commonplace now
Dark Green, Bright Red by Gore Vidal was his second novel, written when he was in his early twenties. This story of a planned revolution in a mythical South American country was probably unbelievable in its day, dealing as itdid does with the involvement of the U.S. governemnt, the United FruitCompany (under another name) and an up front assumption that Uncle Samcalls the shots in Central and South America. Unfortunately Vidal does notgo all the way with this story. The 'hero', a former American Army officerwho has left the service under a cloud of suspicion, 'retires' to themythical country that is the setting for the story, because his good friendfrom WWII is the former President's son. Soon he is caught up in a plot tobring the former president to power once more, and also involved in anaffair with the former president's daughter. Obviously no good can come ofthis, and of course it doesn't. The conclusion is to be expected and themain character leaves the story having experienced much but seeminglyhaving learned little.There is a lot of interest here, especially the clearview that Vidal has of the role played in Latin American relations byentities such as the United Fruit Company and the willingness of the U.S.Government to go to great lenghts to support them. It would be decadesbefore the public at large would recognize this as true. For this alone thebook is worth reading. ... Read more

Product Description
It is a risky (and risque) business becoming 'Woman Triumphant' - exercising total power over men like Rusty Godowski. Rusty just wants to be a Hollywood star like everyone else at Buck Loner's academy, but now that Buck's niece, Myra Breckinridge, has arrived, the curriculum is taking a wildly strange turn. Willing to risk all to be superb and unique, Myra means to prove to her old friend Dr Montag that it is possible to work out in life all one's fantasies - and survive. 'From Myra's fist appearnce on the page she was a megastar', explains her creator, Gore Vidal. Myra caused a second furore when she returned in Myron to battle it out with her eponymous alter ego, a drab little man fallen into marriage and a job in Chinese catering. Theirs is a contest of hormonal roulette, with glorious Myra off on time-travelling missions of mercy back to 1948 to try to change cinema history and to introduce her own radical theories of popuation control. Meanwhile Myron tries desperately to stay in the present as inconspicuously as Mrya will allow. ... Read more

Product Description
Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking presents the author’s often provocative and always engaging thoughts on sexuality. Here, fourteen essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot-button topics such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay bashing and the U.S. Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac. “Vidal’s erudition, candor, and exceptional sense of humor shine.” — San Francisco ChronicleAmazon.com Review
From a delightfully caustic 1965 review of Henry Miller's Sexus ("Arcane words are put to use, often accurately") to a brief response to the homophobic torture and murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998, Sexually Speaking brings together some of Gore Vidal's best essays on sex and sexuality. Although some of the essays are explicitly political, such as the 1979 Playboy article "Sex Is Politics," many seem to be included simply because they mention the sex lives of people Vidal has known. (One doesn't really need an excuse to republish his delicious reminiscences of Eleanor Roosevelt, Christopher Isherwood, or Tennessee Williams; the Roosevelt piece in particular feels somewhat wedged into the present volume.)

There are also three interviews: two from the mid-'70s, although written for semi-underground gay magazines, touch upon a variety of political and literary issues; a 1992 conversation finds Larry Kramer practically badgering Vidal to admit that he's a homosexual. As he has throughout his career, Vidal refuses to be categorized on the basis of sexual acts: "I've never applied [these labels] to myself nor have I applied them to anybody else, even when they have invited me to." Sexually Speaking is as entertaining as it is provocative, an interesting supplement to the more comprehensive The Essential Gore Vidal. --Ron Hogan ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Provocative and Engaging
Vidal, Gore. "Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings of Gore Vidal", Cleis Press, 2001.

Provocative and Engaging

Amos Lassen

In "Sexually Speaking" Gore Vidal gives us fourteen essays and three interviews all of which have been previously published. Here they are all together for the first time. Vidal is basically famous for his literary talent but he is also known for not paying any mind to the customs, norms and taboos of the modern age. He therefore is able to subjectively look at contemporary culture. Vidal maintains that the sexual attitudes of modern society come about as a result of political decisions.
The book opens with a 1965 review of Henry Miller's "Sexus" and continues through Vidal's thoughts on the murder of Matthew Shepherd in 1998. Two of the interviews were written for underground gay magazines in the 1970's and the third is from 1992 in which Larry Kramer tries to get Vidal "to come out" which he does not do because Vidal does not believe in labels. Vidal's opinions on sexuality are extremely trenchant--more than we would think they would be. The essays defy those who try to place tables on people based upon sexual acts and preferences.
Vidal has a wonderful sense of humor which he shares with us as he chisels away the rocks of repression and hypocrisy and opens many new doors and the book offers great insight with a host of relevant topics. Vidal is smart and funny and this is a book that cries out to be read.

Gotta Balance these Stars.....NOTHING deserves 5 ...-kisses
Great for people who haven't read the essays before.Vidal rules the psycho-sociological TAKE on historical relevance in today's "situations".....or "acts," if you prefer.He knows where to provide the JUICE in each issue and has a backlog of great lit & history that helps swirl the goodies with great authority.Who knows what he's up to.ARe the days of cruisin for boys over, or does he resort to the South American tradition of "little boys'" parties.I seriously doubt it, but it would be funny.The book CRADLE OF EROTICA by Kinsey & Masters (Kinsey's ghost name is Allan Edwardes) is a great side book to have along the ride.Unfortunately he "peppers"(a word he humiliates in the essays) the good stuff with opinions on population control.Hell, the supply of young nubile boys enjoyed by the literary elite would certainly go down if his ideas were to be applied!!!

Anyways, Vidal could write more of this good stuff, but his grumblin' needs to get the TRUTH out prevents it.That's fine, but that just requires his reading public to savor every word, if ya ask a true fan.

Funny and thoughtful
Gore Vidal is one of my favourite USA writers, because we share some ideas, which is logical and it explains why he lives in Europe, USA is very rightish this years...But it is a country where critics to the system could be thought and published (think of Chomsky, for instance), and that's good, although I'm not sure if Gore Vidal has got many readers in his own country. Anyway, he talks about sexuallity in USA, specially homosexuality, with a high sense of humour -very entertaining, indeed. And listen, the idea that there're not "gays" and "straights" is not his, you can also read it in Marvin Harris books: our Western society is the only one that qualifies somebody because of his/her sexual tendencies.

Another AK Best Seller
14 essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot button issues such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay-bashing in the US Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac.

Bisexuality, Global Overpopulation, Childless by Choice...
... Environmental Consciousness, Political Awareness and generally not succumbing to the mindless morass of pedestrian thought and values -- which are neither thought-through nor truly valuable.Gore Vidal's compiled essays on sexuality -- both in terms of the act as well as gender and sexual orientation -- is an invaluable comfort to anyone whose rejection of "The American Dream" has been met with resistance and criticism.

Read Vidal, and then remember that being who you are is more important than succumbing to who other people try to convince you to be. ... Read more

Product Description
"There is not one human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise." So said Gore Vidal.

Almost sixty years ago, Gore Vidal burst onto the literary landscape with his World War II novel "Williwaw". He never looked back. To date he has published twenty-nine novels, one short story collection, six theatrical plays, and numerous books of nonfiction. His novel "The City and the Pillar" (1948) was a groundbreaking work in the history of homosexual literature. In "Myra Breckinridge" (1968) Vidal created a ribald parody of sexual morality and identity. In 1967 Vidal published "Washington, D.C.". It would be the first of seven novels that have come to be known as the American Chronicles, a sprawling history of the empire filled with a cast of the most significant social, literary, and political figures of the United States.

Conversations with Gore Vidal features provocative and intriguing interviews with one of America's most prolific authors. Vidal was an enfant terrible in the 1940s and a marginalized homosexual in the 1950s. As Edgar Box he wrote mysteries and as a screenwriter he penned the script for Ben-Hur. In 1960 he ran for Congress. In the 1990s, he appeared in films such as "Gattaca", "Bob Roberts", and "Shadow Conspiracy". His essay collection "United States: Essays 1952-1992", which features 114 pieces on everything from Howard Hughes to French literature, won the National Book Award.

Vidal proves himself here to be a witty, acerbic, cantankerous conversationalist, one who is willing to --- and often eager to --- defy conventional wisdom and lacerate the tired clichés inherent in both politics and literature. A defiant political insider who is related to both the Gores and the Kennedys, he is a proud Leftist who nevertheless does not hesitate to slash at party orthodoxy when he deems it necessary. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

a consummate collection
So enticing is Vidal's cruel wind that a beautiful, rapacious genius lights each of theseinterviews. Gore Vidal is a reflector, our mirror. Looking, we see truth, as we see ourselves. Such is his charism; his accomplishment is our unaccustomed vigor at discovering the man in the mirror. There's a spacious lot of vintage Vidal here, but more - the Larry Kramer interview is haunting. The interviewers are uniformly a fine match, and everywhere Gore reigns! The end piece with Amy Goodman getting down deep. I'm sorry the book ended. It's a remarkable set of pieces, the most pleasing I've read in a long while. Big recommendation.

Unique, Consistent, A Gem
Being more familiar with Vidal the personality than Gore the author, I was fascinated by this series of interviews that took place over decades.He is incredibly bright, witty and insightful.He is also very consistent in his stories from interview to interview.It was a pleasure to read.

A Fun Collection
Gore Vidal is one of America's wittiest and intelligent commentators (besides a first class novelist and essayist).This collection of interviews given between the years 1960 and 2003 are presented chronologically which allows the reader to watch how Vidal's views and opinions develop and shift.Being a collection of interviews many of the anecdotes get to be a bit repetitious.Other than that, the collection covers a wide range of subjects -- American history, the craft of writing, the state of literature, television, movies, and politics of all kinds.And all subjects, Gore Vidal gives a lot of food for thought.

Gore scores again
As always, Gore Vidal is direct,honest and penetrating in his perceptions of the American and human cultural experience.Who do we have to fill this gap when he is gone?

Conversations with the Master
In 11 interviews from 1960 to 2003,Vidal talks about sex, religion, the movies, politics, literature--in short, everything that makes life interesting.Lots of gems scattered throughout.Vidal is America's greatest living man of letters.Not since Edmund Wilson have we had such a great critic, and the two of them along with H.L. Mencken comprise the three great public intellectuals of 20th-century America.Hear America's greatest public intellectual talk in this new volume. The only disappointment you'll feel is when the conversation runs out at the end. ... Read more

Product Description
The Best Man crackles with the smart lines and situations inherent to the work of Gore Vidal. The political intrigues rampant in Vidals 1960 setting are strangly similar to the political intrigues of the present day. This darkly satirical drama finds two presidential contenders seeking the endorsement of an aging ex-president and explores how personal agendas can change the course of a nations destiny.

A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Terrence Currier, Johnny Holliday, Naomi Jacobson, Timmy Ray James, Michael Kramer, Marsha Mason, Paul Morella, Kevin Murray, Judy Simmons, Gary Sloan and Senator Fred Thompson. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"The Best Man" indeed wins
This script is just as timely today during the current election climate as it was when Gore Vidal first penned it back in the 60s. Yes...as with all writings, some material is a bit on the dated side, (especially the references to women before the women's right movement of the 70s) but all in all the same truths hold up today as they did back then. A good read. By chance the other night, I also happened to catch the film version with Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson. It was faithful to the script and very good.

A little dated but still excellent
There were a ton of great political movies made in the early and mid 1960's and this is the basis for one of the best.Originally a Broadway play, it was made into a movie starting Henry Fonda and a young Cliff Robertson.(I highly recommend the movie.)

It's the story of two very different men vying for the nomination of their party for President.One is moral and intellectual and the other, well, not so much. The dialogue is outstanding and has certain expectations of the reader.Younger readers may have to keep Google on stand-by.But it flows well and builds towards a great surprise ending.

One caveat: It is a play, not a novel.
... Read more