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by: Gore Vidal
List Price: $15.95Amazon.com's Price: $10.85 You Save: $5.10 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375724817
ISBN: 0375724818
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 480
Publication Date: September 18, 2001
Publisher: Vintage
Sales Rank: 292475
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
The Golden Age is Vidal's crowning achievement, a vibrant tapestry of American political and cultural life from 1939 to 1954, when the epochal events of World War II and the Cold War transformed America, once and for all, for good or ill, from a republic into an empire. The sharp-eyed and sympathetic witnesses to these events are Caroline Sanford, Hollywood actress turned Washington D.C., newspaper publisher, and Peter Sanford, her nephew and publisher of the independent intellectual journal The American Idea. They experience at first hand the masterful maneuvers of Franklin Roosevelt to bring a reluctant nation into the Second World War, and, later, the actions of Harry Truman that commit the nation to a decade-long twilight struggle against Communism—developments they regard with a decided skepticism even though it ends in an American global empire. The locus of these events is Washington D.C., yet the Hollywood film industry and the cultural centers of New York also play significant parts. In addition to presidents, the actual characters who appear so vividly in the pages of The Golden Age include Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Wendell Willkie, William Randolph Hearst, Dean Acheson, Tennessee Williams, Joseph Alsop, Dawn Powell—and Gore Vidal himself.
The Golden Age offers up U.S. history as only Gore Vidal can, with unrivaled penetration, wit, and high drama, allied to a classical view of human fate. It is a supreme entertainment that is not only sure to be a major bestseller but that will also change listeners' understanding of American history and power.
Amazon.com Review:
Since 1967, when he published Washington, D.C., Gore Vidal has been assembling an artful, acidic history of the United States. The Golden Age represents the seventh and final installment of this national epic, covering the years from 1939 to 1954 (with a valedictory fast-forward, in its final pages, to the end of the millennium). As Vidal did in the earlier books, the author sticks pretty rigorously to the facts. Real-life figures--in this case, the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and that ardent cold warrior Dean Acheson--do what they are recorded to have done. The author also ushers on a cast of invented characters, who are free to paddle in the historical backwash and comment upon their so-called contemporaries. It's here, of course, that fact and fiction begin to blur. But Vidal himself has often cited Tolstoy's famous jab--'History would be an excellent thing if it only were true'--and his reconstruction of FDR's wartime machinations, and the brief interval of Pax Americana, seem persuasively, even alarmingly plausible.
There's one key difference between this book and its predecessors, however. Vidal was alive and kicking in 1939, and thanks to his role as Senator Thomas Pryor Gore's grandson (and occasional seeing-eye dog), he met or at least observed many of The Golden Age's dramatis personae. This fact turns out to have a double edge. On one hand, it gives his portraits of the high and mighty an extra ounce of verisimilitude. Here (the invented) Caroline Sanford observes her old friend FDR at an informal White House mixer: She felt for an instant that she should curtsey in the awesome presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a figure who towered even when seated in his wheelchair. It was the head and neck that did the trick, she decided, with a professional actor's eye. The neck was especially thick while the famous head seemed half again larger than average, its thinning gray hair combed severely back from a high rounded forehead. Like all of Vidal's politicians, FDR is a more or less gifted illusionist, and The Golden Age is one more chapter in the convergence of theater and politics, of Hollywood and Washington, D.C. But the very vividness of these historical actors (in every sense of the phrase) makes the author's invented cast seem a little pale and lifeless. No matter. Even in its occasional longueurs, Vidal's concluding volume is packed with ironic insight and world-class gossip, much of it undoubtedly true. And in the surprisingly metafictional finale, he signs off with a fine display of Heraclitean fireworks, not to mention an encore appearance from his rakish progenitor Aaron Burr--which makes you wonder exactly who created whom. --James Marcus
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Vidal's "good old days"
The era covered by the book is clearly sentimental to Vidal, hence the title "Golden Years." I guess it's a natural tendency of people to see their formative years as the good old days. Vidal reveres the enigmatic FDR as a political icon and pities the bucolic and inferior Harry Truman who is tapped to fill FDR's shoes. In Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, the movies from this era (late thirties to mid forties) are considered the only movies of any substance or merit. On a larger scale, FDR's administration ... Read More
Rating: - A Silver Book For A Golden Age?
Just finished (albeit an audio version -- long drive) version of The Golden Age by Gore Vidal. I've been meaning to read more Vidal (I still have Burr in my "to be read" pile) but other books just seem to get in the way.
Vidal can certainly tell a story and each "episode" is quite distinct, but it didn't seem to really tie together. I'm not sure if it was the abridgement of it, or if it was just its episodic nature. The blurring of fact and fiction are interesting, and one must go along ... Read More
Rating: - Not Vidal's best but interesting
I gave The Golden Age three stars primarily because the book had three tiresome flaws that kept it from achieving the excellence of his novel Lincoln.
The first weakness of this book is that Gore Vidal was far less subtle in controlling his own political philosophy in The Golden Age, possibly because the era in the novel was one in which Vidal lived, whereas in Lincoln, there was enough distance in time that Vidal was able to show more objectivity. For fans of Gore Vidal, of which I am one, his ... Read More
Rating: - Always entertaining--this time with a modern twist
Gore Vidal is a quintessentially American writer, intensely focused on our history, character and future. This last of the "Narratives of Empire" takes the saga begun with "Burr" right into the 21st century. "The Golden Age" starts in the pre-WWII period, as the fictional Caroline Sanford returns to Washington to be swept up in the machinations of FDR leading the country into WWII. A good chunk of the book makes the case that FDR "knew" that the Japanese were about to attack, and Vidal argues that he sacrificed ... Read More
Rating:  - more an argument, less a novel
I must confess that I feel ambivalent about this book. I greatly admire the other volumes of the series, not only for their value as iconoclastic evocations of American history, but as novels in themselves with vibrant and fascinating characters. Vidal is, simply put, one of America's greatest living artists. His voice is unique and unmistakable. In other volumes, his personal views are hidden and cryptic, which is great fun as the reader is kept guessing. Alas, in this one, I found his views to be baldly plain ... Read More
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