![]() ![]() Vidal does equally well personifying Burrs contemporaries. Rather, Vidals novel reflects a plausible portrait of the only vice-president to literally get away with murder. ![]() Vidals novel goes a long way in humanizing Burr, but does not necessarily minimize his notoriety. ![]() 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. Aaron Burr, along with Benedict Arnold, were Americas original bad boys. To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. American politics, suggests Vidal, had a penchant for the vulgar. Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Here, the latter appears as a power-hungry 'parvenu' from the West Indies and the former as a semi-literate slave-owning tyrant. Instead he appears as one of the 'host of choice spirits' forced to live among coarse, materialistic, hypocritical people, among them Jefferson and Hamilton. 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. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidals Narratives of Empire series, which spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to post-World War II. Three years later, on the order of President Thomas Jefferson, he was tried for treason: for plotting to dismember the United States. In 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Gore Vidal's classic novel of Aaron Burr - the man who shot Alexander Hamilton. ![]()
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