Fourty-four essays on literature, politicking in government and in literary circles, and such celebrated contemporary characters as Norman Mailer, Dr. David Reuben, and Susan Sontag by the man Alfred Kazin has called "one of the best-informed and most biting polemicists of our overgrown American way of life."
"A collection as varied as it is excellent, a temperature reading of a feverish society." —Saturday Review
"Some of the most courageous, liveliest and wittiest comment on literature, the theatre and social life that has lately been written in America." —Philip Rahv
"Not only are the individual essays excellent, the whole volume is more than the sum of its parts." —Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books
"In this era of instant sages and overnight superstars, Vidal the essayist is a national treasure, one of the very few sane voices amidst the babble." —Sheldon Frank, Chicago Daily News
Fourty-four essays on literature, politicking in government and in literary circles, and such celebrated contemporary characters as Norman Mailer, Dr. David Reuben, and Susan Sontag by the man Alfred Kazin has called "one of the best-informed and most biting polemicists of our overgrown American way of life."
Praise
"A collection as varied as it is excellent, a temperature reading of a feverish society." —Saturday Review
"Some of the most courageous, liveliest and wittiest comment on literature, the theatre and social life that has lately been written in America." —Philip Rahv
"Not only are the individual essays excellent, the whole volume is more than the sum of its parts." —Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books
"In this era of instant sages and overnight superstars, Vidal the essayist is a national treasure, one of the very few sane voices amidst the babble." —Sheldon Frank, Chicago Daily News
