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Kronieken van het Keizerrijk Reeks

Deze epische saga duikt in de opkomst en ondergang van een fictief Amerikaans imperium. Het verweeft nauwgezet de privélevens van twee verzonnen families met de publieke carrières van historische figuren en cruciale gebeurtenissen. Het verhaal biedt een brede verkenning van ambitie, macht en de veranderende landschappen van een natie. Van de dageraad tot de uiteindelijke neergang biedt het een boeiend en kritisch perspectief op het historische verloop van een land.

Washington DC
Hollywood: A novel of America in the 1920s
Empire
1876
Lincoln
Burr

Aanbevolen leesvolgorde

  1. Burr

    • 512bladzijden
    • 18 uur lezen

    Gore Vidal's classic novel of Aaron Burr - the man who shot Alexander Hamilton. 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?

    Burr1
    4,1

  2. Lincoln

    • 657bladzijden
    • 23 uur lezen

    "The portrait is reasoned, judicious, straightforward and utterly convincing." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW In this profoundly moving work of epic proportion and intense human sympathy, Abraham Lincoln is observed by his loved ones, his rivals, and his future assassins. In this brilliantly realized, vividly imagined work of fiction, Gore Vidal gives us a portrait of America's great president that is at once intimate and public, stark and complex, and that will become for future generations the living Lincoln, the definitive Lincoln. "Richly entertaining....For the general reader the elegant explication of the issues of the day gives hearty satisfaction: history lessons with the blood still hot." THE WASHINGTON POST

    Lincoln2
    4,3

  3. 1876

    A Novel

    • 439bladzijden
    • 16 uur lezen

    The third volume of Gore Vidal's magnificent series of historical novels aimed at demythologizing the American past, 1876 chronicles the political scandals and dark intrigues that rocked the United States in its centennial year. ------Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, Aaron Burr's unacknowledged son, returns to a flamboyant America after his long, self-imposed European exile. The narrator of Burr has come home to recoup a lost fortune by arranging a suitable marriage for his beautiful daughter, the widowed Princess d'Agrigente, and by ingratiating himself with Samuel Tilden, the favored presidential candidate in the centennial year. With these ambitions and with their own abundant charms, Schuyler and his daughter soon find themselves at the centers of American social and political power at a time when the fading ideals of the young republic were being replaced by the excitement of empire. ------A glorious piece of writing, said Jimmy Breslin in Harper's. Vidal can take history and make it powerful and astonishing. Time concurred: Vidal has no peers at breathing movement and laughter into the historical past. ------With a new Introduction by the author. From the Hardcover edition.

    18763
    3,9

  4. Empire

    • 480bladzijden
    • 17 uur lezen

    The brilliant successor to Burr and Lincoln, a stunning historical novel of Theodore Roosevelt's Washington, America's Gilded Age and the expanding American empire, seen through the eyes and minds of the remarkable men and women who ruled it.

    Empire4
    3,9

  6. Washington DC

    • 408bladzijden
    • 15 uur lezen

    Een roman met de recente politieke geschiedenis van Amerika als achtergrond. Twee invloedrijke mannen, een senator en een krantenmagnaat bestrijden vanuit hun hoge posities Franklin Roosevelt. De families van deze twee mannen die ook onderling nog weer verwikkeld zijn in een machtsstrijd, vormen de hoofdpersonen van dit boek dat vnl. handelt over macht, geld en sex. Het eerste deel speelt voor de oorlog waarin de onkreukbare senator een fout maakt door geld aan te nemen voor een verkiezingscampagne, het tweede deel vertelt over de tijd gedurende de oorlog waarin het status quo op regeringsgebied wordt gehandhaafd, maar de jeugd aan bod begint te komen. Het derde deel, de tijd na de oorlog waarin vroeger begane zonden aan het licht komen door de Mc. Carthy-heksenjacht en de oude garde het moet afleggen tegen de jeugd. Een boeiend boek dat helaas zeer letterlijk vertaald is met stijve woorden en houterige, ingewikkelde zinnen.

    Washington DC6
    3,8

  7. The Golden Age

    • 467bladzijden
    • 17 uur lezen

    The concluding volume in Gore Vidal's American empire novels presents a vibrant tapestry of American political and cultural life from 1939 to 1954, capturing the transformation of the nation from a republic into an empire amid the tumult of World War Two and the Cold War. Central to the narrative are Caroline Sanford, a D.C. newspaper publisher turned Hollywood producer, and her nephew Peter Sanford, who publishes the independent journal The American Idea. They witness Franklin Roosevelt's skillful efforts to draw a reluctant nation into World War Two, followed by Harry Truman's commitment to a prolonged struggle against Communism. Despite their skepticism about these developments, they observe the emergence of an American global empire. The story unfolds primarily in Washington, D.C., while also highlighting the influential Hollywood film industry and New York's cultural scene. Alongside historical figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Wendell Wilkie, Vidal himself appears vividly in the narrative, enriching the exploration of this pivotal era in American history.

    The Golden Age7
    3,7