Download or read book Homage to Daniel Shays written by Gore Vidal and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-08-22 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourty-four essays on literature, politicking in government and in literary circles, and such celebrated contemporary characters as Norman Mailer, Dr. David Reuben, and Susan Sontag by the man Alfred Kazin has called "one of the best-informed and most biting polemicists of our overgrown American way of life."
Download or read book Homage to Daniel Shays written by Gore Vidal and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gore Vidal written by Fred Kaplan and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “fascinating” biography of an iconic American author and public intellectual “is so full of incident and celebrity . . . a pageant of entertaining stories” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Few writers of recent memory have distinguished themselves in so many fields, and so consummately, as Gore Vidal. A prolific novelist, Vidal also wrote for film and theater, and became a classic essayist of his own time, delivering prescient analyses of American society, politics, and culture. Known for his rapier wit and intelligence, Vidal moved with ease among the cultural elite—his grandfather was a senator, he was intimate with the Kennedys, and one of his best friends was Tennessee Williams. For this definitive biography, Fred Kaplan was given access to Vidal’s papers and letters. The result is an insightful and entertaining portrait of an exceptional and mercurial writer.
Download or read book Demagogues in American Politics written by Charles U. Zug and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While demagoguery is traditionally regarded as destabilizing and dangerous, this book shows how it can also be used to advance the common good. Most of us think that demagoguery is, by definition, bad. Relatedly, scholars almost invariably treat demagoguery as a divisive practice that appeals to what is worst in an audience at the expense of what is best for the public good. In Demagogues in American Politics, Charles U. Zug offers a historical analysis of the role of demagoguery in the American political system. Challenging the conventional wisdom, he argues that demagoguery is not an inherently bad form of leadership. Whereas classical thinkers had believed that demagoguery was always a threat to political order, the most sophisticated founders of the American Constitution-inspired by Enlightenment political philosophy-recognized that demagoguery, though dangerous, could be recruited by the Constitution to improve the political system. Through case studies drawn from the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, this book argues that demagogic leadership can be deployed by public officials to advance the aspirations of constitutional democracy.
Download or read book In Debt to Shays written by Robert A. Gross and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Debt to Shays takes a fresh perspective on the rebellion by challenging existing understandings of late eighteenth-century America and restoring the rebellion to its historical context
Download or read book Why American History Is Not What They Say written by Jeff Riggenbach and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2009 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Americans have been warring with each other for more than a century over the contents of the American history textbooks used in the nation's high schools and colleges"--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Crimes and Cover ups in American Politics written by Donald Jeffries and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history that the textbooks left out. For far too long, American history has been left in the unreliable hands of those that author Donald Jeffries refers to as the court historians. Crimes and Cover-ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 fights back by scrutinizing the accepted history of everything from the American War of Independence to the establishment reputation of Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination, both World Wars, US government experimentation on prisoners, mental patients, innocent children and whole populated areas, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and much, much more. Secular saints like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt are examined in a critical way they seldom have been. Jeffries spares no one and nothing in this explosive new book. The atrocities of Union troops during the Civil War, and Allied troops during World War II, are documented in great detail. The Nuremberg Trials are presented as the antithesis of justice. In the follow-up to his previous, bestselling book Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, Jeffries demonstrates that crimes, corruption, and conspiracies didn't start with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. History should be much more than cardboard villains and impossibly unrealistic heroes. Thanks to the efforts of the court historians, most Americans are historically illiterate. Crimes and Cover-ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 is a bold attempt at setting the record straight.
Download or read book Power and Class in Political Fiction written by David Smit and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-09-13 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces Elite Theory to the literary study of class as a framework for addressing issues of the nature of governance in political fiction. The book describes the historical development and major tenets of Elite Theory, and shows how each of four post-war Washington novels—Gore Vidal’s Washington, D.C.; Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent; Joan Didion’s Democracy; and Ward Just’s Echo House—illustrates the way class-based political elites exhibit forms of “ruling-class consciousness” and maintain their legitimacy in an ostensibly democratic form of government by promoting themselves as models of behavior, promulgating an ideology that justifies their rule through their control of the media, and accepting new members from the lower classes. Reading these novels through a socio-political lens, David Smit offers suggestions for ways to work for a more just and equitable society in light of what this analysis reveals about the “culture” that produces our political elites.
Download or read book Empire of Self written by Jay Parini and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate, authorized yet totally frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925–2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini’s Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal’s colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well—a virtual Who’s Who of the twentieth century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Leonard Bernstein, and the crème de la crème of Hollywood. Also a generous helping of feuds with the likes of William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and The New York Times, among other adversaries. The life of Gore Vidal teemed with notable incidents, famous people, and lasting achievements that call out for careful evocation and examination. Jay Parini crafts Vidal’s life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. Provided with unique access to Vidal’s life and his papers, Parini excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal—novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, historian, wit, provocateur, and pioneer of gay rights—has long needed.
Download or read book Shays s Rebellion written by Leonard L. Richards and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-11-29 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the bitter winter of 1786-87, Daniel Shays, a modest farmer and Revolutionary War veteran, and his compatriot Luke Day led an unsuccessful armed rebellion against the state of Massachusetts. Their desperate struggle was fueled by the injustice of a regressive tax system and a conservative state government that seemed no better than British colonial rule. But despite the immediate failure of this local call-to-arms in the Massachusetts countryside, the event fundamentally altered the course of American history. Shays and his army of four thousand rebels so shocked the young nation's governing elite—even drawing the retired General George Washington back into the service of his country—that ultimately the Articles of Confederation were discarded in favor of a new constitution, the very document that has guided the nation for more than two hundred years, and brought closure to the American Revolution. The importance of Shays's Rebellion has never been fully appreciated, chiefly because Shays and his followers have always been viewed as a small group of poor farmers and debtors protesting local civil authority. In Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle, Leonard Richards reveals that this perception is misleading, that the rebellion was much more widespread than previously thought, and that the participants and their supporters actually represented whole communities—the wealthy and the poor, the influential and the weak, even members of some of the best Massachusetts families. Through careful examination of contemporary records, including a long-neglected but invaluable list of the participants, Richards provides a clear picture of the insurgency, capturing the spirit of the rebellion, the reasons for the revolt, and its long-term impact on the participants, the state of Massachusetts, and the nation as a whole. Shays's Rebellion, though seemingly a local affair, was the revolution that gave rise to modern American democracy.
Download or read book The Second American Revolution and Other Essays 1976 1982 written by Gore Vidal and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-08-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These nineteen essays richly confirm Gore Vidal's reputation as "America's finest essayist" (The New Statesman), and are further evidence of the breadth and depth of his intelligence and wit. Included here are his highly praised essays on Theodore Roosevelt ("An American Sissy"), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson ("This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes"), the need for a new constitutional convention—as well as his controversial study of relations between the homosexual and Jewish communities ("Pink Triangle and Yellow Star"). Vidal's other subjects range from Christopher Isherwood to L. Frank Baum ("The OZ BOoks"), from the question of "Who Makes the Movies?" to the misadventures—religious and financial—of Bert Lance.
Download or read book Live from Golgotha written by Gore Vidal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1993-10-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timothy (later St. Timothy) is in his study in Thessalonika, where he is bishop of Macedonia. It is A.D. 96, and Timothy is under terrific pressure to record his version of the Sacred Story, since, far in the future, a cyberpunk (the Hacker) has been systematically destroying the tapes that describe the Good News, and Timothy's Gospel is the only one immune to the Hacker's deadly virus. Meanwhile, thanks to a breakthrough in computer software, an NBC crew is racing into the past to capture—live from the suburb of Golgotha—the Crucifixion, for a TV special guaranteed to boost the network's ratings in the fall sweeps. As a stream of visitors from twentieth-century America channel in to the first-century Holy Land—Mary Baker Eddy, Shirley MacLaine, Oral Roberts and family—Timothy struggles to complete his story. But is Timothy's text really Hacker-proof? And how will he deal with the truth about Jesus' eating disorder? Above all, will he get the anchor slot for the Big Show at Golgotha without representation by a major agency, like CAA 1,896 years in the future? Tune in.
Download or read book Selected Essays of Gore Vidal written by Gore Vidal and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gore Vidal—novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist—is America's premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. It will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.
Download or read book Twentieth Century Fiction written by George Woodcock and published by Springer. This book was released on 1983-04-01 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mailer s Last Days written by J. Michael Lennon and published by Etruscan Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of essays by Norman Mailer’s biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon’s remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.
Download or read book Gore Vidal and Antiquity written by Quentin J. Broughall and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Gore Vidal’s lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing – sex, politics, and religion – this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal’s portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal’s other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967–2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal’s careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Of interest to students and scholars in classical studies, reception studies, American politics and literature, and the work of Gore Vidal, this volume presents an original perspective on one of the most provocative writers and intellectuals in post-war American letters. It offers new insights into Vidal’s attitudes, influences, and beliefs, and throws fresh light upon his patrician self-fashioning and his mercurial output.
Download or read book Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage written by Claude J. Summers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 1742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised edition of The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage is a reader's companion to this impressive body of work. It provides overviews of gay and lesbian presence in a variety of literatures and historical periods; in-depth critical essays on major gay and lesbian authors in world literature; and briefer treatments of other topics and figures important in appreciating the rich and varied gay and lesbian literary traditions. Included are nearly 400 alphabetically arranged articles by more than 175 scholars from around the world. New articles in this volume feature authors such as Michael Cunningham, Tony Kushner, Anne Lister, Kate Millet, Jan Morris, Terrence McNally, and Sarah Waters; essays on topics such as Comedy of Manners and Autobiography; and overviews of Danish, Norwegian, Philippines, and Swedish literatures; as well as updated and revised articles and bibliographies.
