Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York begins in the bowels of the earth, which is appropriate, because he is digging deep—perhaps deeper than any filmmaker has ever done before Read More

  By Gore Vidal                          Doubleday 448 pages   BOOK REVIEW For years now, the promise of a new Gore Vidal book has been something to get the blood running or boiling. No other American writer has maintained quite such a radical, iconoclastic vision of his nation’s past, and nowhere has Vidal been more provocative than in what he calls his “narratives of empire,” a series of historical novels tracing the American republic from its beginnings to what he sees as its degeneration into a global, quasi-totalitarian behemoth. Throughout Read More