Burr

Author: Gore Vidal

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $24.99 AUD
  • : 9780349105314
  • : Little, Brown Book Group Limited
  • : Abacus
  • :
  • : 0.332
  • : April 1994
  • : 197mm X 126mm X 31mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 24.99
  • : April 2005
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • : Gore Vidal
  • : Narratives of Empire
  • : Paperback
  • : 1
  • :
  • : English
  • : 512
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  • :
  • :
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Barcode 9780349105314
9780349105314

Description

In 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Three years later, on the order of President Thomas Jefferson, he was tried for treason: for plotting to dismember the United States. Gore Vidal, romping iconoclastically through American history, debunks, in this historical novel of Burr's life, the common and casually held notion of the man as a scoundrel and an adventurer. Instead he appears as one of the 'host of choice spirits' forced to live among coarse, materialistic, hypocritical people  among them Jefferson and Hamilton. Here, the latter appears as a power-hungry 'parvenu' from the West Indies and the former as a semi-literate slave-owning tyrant. American politics, suggests Vidal, had a penchant for the vulgar. Even then. Veering backwards to the revolution and the early days of the republic, stopping at dinner-parties on the way, and reaching forward to the future, BURR is a novel about treason, both the particular and in general. For what, asks Vidal, really belongs to whom? What properly belongs to the Constitution, to the nation, to the family even, intriguingly, to novelists and historians?

Promotion info

The first novel in the chronology of Vidal's epic NARRATIVES OF EMPIRE, embodying the passage of American history.

Reviews

'Fascinating reading ... the story is as many-sided as the American continent itself' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Intensely readable; artfully constructed; often touching; sometimes very funny ... written with great skill, wit and elegance' OBSERVER
'Magnificent' Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Author description

Gore Vidal has been at the centre of literary and intellectual life for half a century. He lives in Italy.