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Imperial America

Reflections on the United States of Amnesia

Gore Vidal
June 2004     ISBN: 1560255854

Following the publication of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and its sequel Dreaming War, Gore Vidal was described as "the last noble defender" of the American republic. In Imperial America Vidal observes that there is something suspicious about the "ever reckless Cheney-Bush junta" who have created the Department of Homeland Security, the USA Patriot Act, and embarked upon a series of wars in pursuit of the world's oil reserves--to the extent that they seem not to care about "the decent opinion of mankind."

Continuing a tradition Vidal inaugurated on The David Susskind Show in the early seventies, where Vidal's "real" State of the Union was a counterpoint to "whoever happened to be President," Vidal performs an autopsy on the American republic, where "we have ceased to be a nation under law but a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns."

About the Authors

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than 200 essays and a memoir. The Times Literary Supplement (UK) noted that Vidal's United States (Essays 1952-1992) is "one of the great American books of the twentieth century." It won the 1993 National Book Award.

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