Gore Vidal was a wrecking ball.

160 pages. Donated 2010 May.

The United States has been engaged in what the great historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." The Federation of American Scientists has cataloged nearly 200 military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor. In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed too controversial to publish in this country until now) Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of "evil-doers?" “Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age.” — Washington Post ”Our greatest living man of letters.”—Boston Globe “Vidal’s imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe.”—Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books.

Briskly, Vidal exposes America's myth-making of enemies foreign and domestic

Briskly, Vidal exposes America's myth-making of enemies foreign and domestic. Through several articles printed in the 90s and 2000s, he tells us about the manifest calamities which framed and supported counter measures and counter terrorism efforts. Additionally stringing together corporate America, neo liberalism paradigms, presidential agendas, public image, and the military industrial complex.

A decent collection of essays mostly on blowback in regards to 9/11 and the OKC bombing. Vidal is a good writer but this book contains far too many digressions for my taste. There's also an unfortunate amount of dated theories, personal suspicions, or straight up factual errors unnecessarily mixed into his description of his correspondences with Timothy McVeigh. For a much more rigorous telling of the attack, McVeigh, and the less than satisfactory investigation, I'd recommend Andrew Gumbel's Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed--and Why It Still Matters or even American Terrorist. Die hard Vidal fans will enjoy this book, but newcomers would probably be better off starting somewhere else in his vast collection.