The Golden Age: Number 7 in series (Narratives of empire)

by Gore Vidal (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.24

  THE GOLDEN AGE is the final, eponymous novel that brings to an end what Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called 'Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels or novelised histories', NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE. Like a latter day Anthony Trollope, Vidal masterfully balances the personal with the political, the invented with the historical fact. His heroine from Hollywood, Caroline Sanford, reappears in Washington as President Roosevelt schemes to get the USA into the war by provoking the Japanese. In the novel's ten year span America is master of the globe, with Japan and Europe as colony and dependency under her empire. Against this backdrop there is a glittering explosion in the arts (we see the likes of Lowell, Bernstein and Tennessee Williams and witness the opening night of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE). But by 1950 and the coming of the Korean War, the Golden Age is over. For the reader who wants to be informed as well as vastly entertained about the last two hundred years of American history there could be no better place to start than with Vidal's NARRATIVES.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.24

  The seventh volume of what Vidal has entitled the Narratives of Empire . In The Golden Age , which offers a fictionalized version of American politics from 1940 to 2000, his main charge is that one of the most revered of all 20th-century presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, provoked, and then failed to warn his commanders about, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. His deception was brought about by a poll which revealed that 60 per cent of Americans were opposed to any foreign war. The author uses a series of episodes to show how the US, through its leaders and not through events, became the most influential country in the world, as he reveals (imaginary) conversations in the White House, in newspaper offices and around Washington DC.

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $15.49

  THE GOLDEN AGE is the final, eponymous novel that brings to an end what Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called 'Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels or novelised histories', NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE. Like a latter day Anthony Trollope, Vidal masterfully balances the personal with the political, the invented with the historical fact. His heroine from Hollywood, Caroline Sanford, reappears in Washington as President Roosevelt schemes to get the USA into the war by provoking the Japanese. In the novel's ten year span America is master of the globe, with Japan and Europe as colony and dependency under her empire. Against this backdrop there is a glittering explosion in the arts (we see the likes of Lowell, Bernstein and Tennessee Williams and witness the opening night of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE). But by 1950 and the coming of the Korean War, the Golden Age is over. For the reader who wants to be informed as well as vastly entertained about the last two hundred years of American history there could be no better place to start than with Vidal's NARRATIVES.