Inside The Whale And Other Essays
by George Orwell | 
Two Cheers for Democracy
by E. M. Forster | 
We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for
by Alice Walker | 
Facing Unpleasant Facts
by George Orwell | 
Tremendous Trifles
by G. K. Chesterton | 
The Size of Thoughts
by Nicholson Baker | 
Against Everything
by Mark Greif | 
The Way the World Works
by Nicholson Baker | 
On Looking
by Lia Purpura | 
When I Was a Child I Read Books
by Marilynne Robinson | 
Books v. Cigarettes
by George Orwell | 
Vintage Didion
by Joan Didion | 
Farther Away
by Jonathan Franzen | 
In Praise of Messy Lives
by Katie Roiphe | 
United States
by Gore Vidal | 
Things that Can and Cannot Be Said
by Arundhati Roy | 
We Were Eight Years in Power
by Ta-Nehisi Coates |
Essay On American Contribution and the Democratic Idea
by Winston Churchill | 
The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell |
Known and Strange Things
by Teju Cole |
Like his National Book Award'??winning United States, Gore Vidal'??s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire, affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects. From his celebrated profiles of Clare Boothe Luce and Charles Lindbergh and his controversial essay about the Bill of Rights'??which sparked an extended correspondence with convicted Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh'??to his provocative analyses of literary icons such as John Updike and Mark Twain and his trenchant observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and the Clintons, Vidal weaves a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Written between the first presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and the electoral crisis of 2000, The Last Empire is a sweeping coda to the last century'??s conflicted vision of the American dream. From the Trade Paperback edition.