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.
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, NYCopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
A prolific writer of novels, literary criticism, and social criticism, Vidal is considered by many to be one of the great American writers of the late twentieth century. Given Vidal's complex prose and acerbic wit, it is a daunting task to read this work. Dan Cashman performs this text in an excellent fashion. He deftly handles the pauses, parenthetical remarks, and asides in each essay and never falters on the many names and foreign phrases. Vidal excoriates John Updike, a biographer of Mark Twain, and most contemporary political figures, and Cashman clearly communicates Vidal's contempt. Cashman seems to understand the text so well one might think Vidal is reading his own work. M.L.C. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Review
"The American tradition of independent and curious learning is kept alive in the wit and great expressiveness of Gore Vidal's criticism."
--Citation for the 1982 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Praise for Gore Vidal's Previous Essay Collection, United States:
"In 114 essays written over a period of forty years, Gore Vidal has shown himself to be a masterly, learned, and percipient observer of an unparalleled range of subjects. United States: Essays 1952-1992 assesses such diverse matters as modern French fiction, the Kennedys, underappreciated writers like Thomas Love Peacock, and the American attitude toward sex. He writes tenderly of authors and people he cherishes Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, William Dean Howells. Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience, and the persuasive powers of a great essayist."
--Citation for the 1993 National Book Award
"Gore Vidal, essayist; so good that we cannot do without him. He is a treasure of the state."
--R. W. B. Lewis, New York Times Book Review
"Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age, and we should thank the gods that we still have him to kick us around. Long may he flourish."
Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"The century's finest essayist."
--Jonathan Keates, Spectator
Last Empire Essays 1992-2000 (Unabridged) FROM OUR EDITORS
Love him or hate him as a novelist, you have to agree that Gore Vidal is one of our finest and most provocative essayists. His last major collection, United States: Essays 1952-1992, won the National Book Award. This grouping contains some dandies, such as his tributes to Dawn Powell and Mark Twain; his scourging of recent American presidents; and "The Shredding of the Bill of Rights," his much-discussed Vanity Fair piece on the national security state.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
"The Last Empire is Gore Vidal's ninth collection of essays. As in the previous volumes, Vidal displays unparalleled range and inimitable style as he deals with matters literary, historical, personal, and political."--BOOK JACKET.
FROM THE CRITICS
Book Magazine
Vidal, one of America's most respected dissident, has over the years published many such collections of book reviews and historical and social commentary. Vidal, now in his seventies, occasionally appears to be self-consciously clawing for a place in history, but his themes bear repeating and his essays may be the only place one finds appreciation for authors such as Dawn Powell and C.P. Cavafy. Vidal is from an old political family (Al Gore is a distant cousin) and personally knows many of the political and literary figures he writes about. This unique position inspires pieces full of both original insight and catty gossip. ﾽKevin Grandfield
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.
AudioFile
A prolific writer of novels, literary criticism, and social criticism, Vidal is considered by many to be one of the great American writers of the late twentieth century. Given Vidal's complex prose and acerbic wit, it is a daunting task to read this work. Dan Cashman performs this text in an excellent fashion. He deftly handles the pauses, parenthetical remarks, and asides in each essay and never falters on the many names and foreign phrases. Vidal excoriates John Updike, a biographer of Mark Twain, and most contemporary political figures, and Cashman clearly communicates Vidal's contempt. Cashman seems to understand the text so well one might think Vidal is reading his own work. M.L.C. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
More political and literary essays from Vidal (The Golden Age, 2000, etc.). Vidal's style is unmistakable: erudite, contrarian, self-aggrandizing, elegant. Cranky. Never has it been more Vidal-ian than here, in his ninth volume of essays, a collection of pieces written between 1992 and 2000 that occasionally borders on self-parody. By far the strongest works are the literary and historical sketches grouped at the beginning: witty, knowing, insightful, and carefully written, taken together they comprise a prickly tour of the midcentury world of American letters. The last 20 essays are far more problematic, however. In these Vidal rants endlessly about the National Security State and the American Empire, two self-identified postwar political structures that he claims have ruined everything good about America. If one hasn't read Vidal's take on these issues before, perusing one of these essays might be fun-but reading 20 of them is not. Although they have different titles and are nominally written on different subjects, the monotony of analysis is numbing. (Plus, it's hard to take Chicken Little seriously when, after nine volumes, the sky still hasn't fallen.) But no matter, there are plenty of fireworks in the literary and historical sections-most compellingly, in a wonderful riff on Sinclair Lewis that interlocks with a controversial defense of Charles Lindbergh in an attempt to revive an intriguing pre-WWII American icon: the plainspoken, isolationist, independent hero from the Great Plains. Amazingly, Vidal, for all his namedropping and urbanity, can't help but see himself in this role. A similarly palpable identification warms, to fascinating effect, the pieces on writersas diverse as Cavafy, Dawn Powell, and Mark Twain. And a merciless attack on Updike is not only provocative but wickedly funny, a flash of the younger Vidal's dead-on comic sense. Vidal's gossip can feel as stale as his (very dated) political concerns, but few today have what he still displays in abundance: the desire, the intelligence, and the wit to continue living as a true man of letters.
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