From Publishers Weekly
Gore Vidal admires Edmund Wilson, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, W.D. Howells, the recently resurrected Dawn Powell ("our best mid-century novelist") and the almost entirely unknown Isabel Potter. His praise, however, often seems a form of self-portraiture: when he remarks on Wilson's "powerful wide-ranging mind," one gets the feeling that he's glancing at a mirror. And in a public-relations first, he manages to extract a posthumous blurb of sorts from Thomas Mann 47 years after the publication of Vidal's novel The City and the Pillar (the German novelist had ignored the novel when Vidal sent it to him in 1948, but Vidal publishes here extracts from Mann's diary which describe the work as "brilliant" in parts but "faulty and unpleasant" overall). Vidal despises academics and the humorless, two groups apparently synonymous in his mind. There is a cautionary illustration here of the folly of answering a negative review: when Vidal trashes a Mark Twain biography and the author replies, Vidal's response is a crippling artillery blast. But that salvo is nothing compared to the tonnage he drops on arch-rival John Updike; Vidal devotes the longest of these essays to a merciless bombardment of Updike for being shallow and jingoistic, undeterred (or perhaps spurred on) by Updike's superior critical reputation. When not settling literary scores, Vidal turns to politics, where he belies his patrician background by consistently rooting for the little people in their struggles against an impersonal empire. In one especially choice paragraph, Vidal observes that two months after The City and the Pillar was published and its same-sex themes put an end to the political ambition his family had for him, his cousin Al Gore was born in a moment of "weird symmetry... whose meaning I leave to the witches on the heath." Commenting on Gore's central flaw, his Jimmy Carter-like obsession with flawless order, Vidal observes that the greatest presidents, such as FDR, knew that nothing really connects and that the best political minds simply adapt and move on. Vidal's ninth collection of essays, this one shows the mandarin populist to be at the height of his powers of both vituperation and sagacity. It leaves one impatient already for the tenth.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.From Library Journal
Beginning with essays about Edmund Wilson, Isabel Potter, Isabel Bolton, and Dawn Powell is a subtle launch, since many listeners haven't thought about these literary luminaries since college, if ever. But soon more familiar names and events from literature and politics ignite sparks of interest: Bill Clinton, FDR, Al Gore, Sinclair Lewis, Charles Lindbergh, Harry Truman, Mark Twain, the Bill of Rights, World War II, and the war on drugs. Whether describing events the public witnesses through the news media lens (one chapter is titled "Birds and Bees and Clinton") or as legend (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's marriage), Vidal's perspectives are neither ordinary nor vernacular. The result is a satisfying intellectual workout for those who missed his original works in issues of The Nation, New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the like. This, Vidal's ninth collection, picks up where his 1993 National Book Award for Nonfiction winner, United States: Essays, 1952-1992, left off. Narrator Dan Cashman's neutral and unbiased tone is the perfect trumpet for Vidal's snappy vocabulary and literary allusions. Recommended, but repackaging will be a must the original box is flimsy. Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
