Get Free Ebook Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw
Positions currently this Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw as one of your book collection! Yet, it is not in your bookcase compilations. Why? This is the book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw that is given in soft documents. You could download the soft data of this stunning book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw currently as well as in the link provided. Yeah, various with the other individuals which look for book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw outside, you can get much easier to position this book. When some people still walk right into the shop and also search guide Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw, you are here just remain on your seat and obtain guide Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw.
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw
Get Free Ebook Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw
Find the trick to improve the quality of life by reading this Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw This is a sort of book that you need currently. Besides, it can be your favorite publication to check out after having this publication Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw Do you ask why? Well, Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw is a publication that has various characteristic with others. You may not should know which the writer is, just how well-known the work is. As wise word, never evaluate the words from which talks, however make the words as your inexpensive to your life.
Right here, we have various book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw as well as collections to read. We also serve alternative kinds and kinds of the e-books to look. The fun publication, fiction, history, novel, science, and other types of books are available below. As this Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw, it turneds into one of the favored book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw collections that we have. This is why you are in the right site to view the incredible books to have.
It won't take more time to obtain this Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw It won't take even more money to publish this book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw Nowadays, people have actually been so clever to use the technology. Why do not you use your gadget or various other device to conserve this downloaded and install soft documents book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw By doing this will let you to always be come with by this e-book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw Naturally, it will certainly be the very best buddy if you read this book Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw up until finished.
Be the very first to purchase this publication now and get all reasons why you have to read this Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw Guide Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw is not just for your responsibilities or requirement in your life. Publications will certainly always be an excellent buddy in whenever you check out. Now, allow the others find out about this web page. You could take the benefits and also discuss it also for your buddies as well as people around you. By this way, you can really get the meaning of this publication Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal, By Michael Mewshaw profitably. What do you think of our suggestion here?
A generous, entertaining, intimate look at Gore Vidal, a man who prided himself on being difficult to know
Detached and ironic; a master of the pointed put-down, of the cutting quip; enigmatic, impossible to truly know: This is the calcified, public image of Gore Vidal―one the man himself was fond of reinforcing. "I'm exactly as I appear," he once said of himself. "There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."
Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, a memoir of his friendship with the stubbornly iconoclastic public intellectual, is a welcome corrective to this tired received wisdom. A complex, nuanced portrait emerges in these pages―and while "Gore" can indeed be brusque, standoffish, even cruel, Mewshaw also catches him in more vulnerable moments. The Gore Vidal the reader comes to know here is generous and supportive to younger, less successful writers; he is also, especially toward the end of his life, disappointed, even lonely.
Sparkling, often hilarious, and filled with spicy anecdotes about expat life in Italy, Sympathy for the Devil is an irresistible inside account of a man who was himself―faults and all―impossible to resist. As enlightening as it is entertaining, it offers a unique look at a figure many only think they know.
- Sales Rank: #814344 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-13
- Released on: 2015-01-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.54" h x .83" w x 5.72" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
“Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise--swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid.” ―John Domini, Bookforum
“[Mewshaw's] Vidal is brilliantly alive, raunchy, as easily offended as he is quick to give offense--and then, finally, desperately self-hating, vituperative, and alone.” ―Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe
“Michael Mewshaw knew Vidal as a friend for nearly forty years, and he pays his respects to him in this affectionate, sympathetic biography. [Sympathy for the Devil is] a thoroughly entertaining, breezy and up-close memoir about a public man of 'wealth and taste' who prided himself on his pride.” ―Tom Lavoie, Shelf Awareness
“Fascinating . . . Sympathy for the Devil might be the perfect Vidal biography because it reveals a figure that is more human - more flawed, more interesting, more real - than the caricature that the public came to accept as the bona fide Gore.” ―Doug Childers, Richmond Times
“Exceptionally entertaining.” ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“Mewshaw develops a picture of his friend as quixotic, a devoted life-mate to his companion Howard Austin, an avuncular if not fatherly figure and often a raging provocateur at dinner parties, banquets and conferences-except when he's not. Mewshaw records a lot of sharp, witty one-liners which, as he reveals, Vidal practiced and polished before he delivered them. And the vast amounts of alcohol the writer imbibed on a daily basis reveal him to be a contradictory character . . . A study of friendship with a famous man, easy to admire and difficult to love.” ―Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered
“In Sympathy for the Devil, Michael Mewshaw removes the mask to reveal a man much more complexand tortured than most fans of Vidal's writings might ever have dared imagine . . . The decline andfall of Gore Vidal is a painful but perversely exciting read. Behind the patrician veneer was clearly a troubled man.” ―Robert Collison, The Toronto Star
“A companionable account that finally succeeds in living up to its title. The reader, too, will feel sympathy for the old devil . . . there is little doubt that Mewshaw's affection for Vidal is genuine.” ―James Campbell, The Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Michael Mewshaw's more-than-four-decade career spans fiction, nonfiction, literary criticism, and investigative journalism. He is the author of, among other titles, the nonfiction works Life for Death, Short Circuit, and Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Journey Across North Africa; the novel Year of the Gun; and the memoirs Do I Owe You Something? and If You Could See Me Now. He has published hundreds of articles, reviews, and literary profiles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Newsweek, Harper's, Granta, and many other international outlets. During the winter he lives in Key West, Florida, with his wife, Linda, and he spends the rest of the year traveling in Europe and Africa.
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Up Close and Personal
By Suzanne Dunaway
Although not everyone will grasp the dolce vita aspect of Gore's time in his beloved Roma, no reader will finish Michael Mewshaw's book without a keener sense of life as it used to be in that magical city and how Gore Vidal was such an integral part of the community during his sojourn among the literati, artists, vagabonds, wannabees and those simply enjoying the view of a rich and decadent time in Rome's history. Michael was there at the heels of those who made up a particular society of 'devils' as they came and went through the era of Red Brigades, the Mafia, political buffoonery and just plain enjoyment of the many virtues and vices of the world's most beautiful city.
I loved this book because it was up close and personal, not just an outsider's biography of a contentious and controversial figure in film, literature and the lecture scene. I loved getting to know this very complicated, arrogant, beleaguered-by-demons man, and grew to almost love him as he wandered perilously close to precipices, both real and imagined. I had just read the biography of Tennessee William's before I plunged into Mr. Mewshaw's tome, and I found the juxtaposition of the two fascinating and vastly different. But Mr. Mewshaw's book was more intimate and heartfelt, a daily diary of misadventures and magic moments in the life of a talented, tormented and often testy individual. One comes away with a clear understanding that Mr. Mewshaw balanced many emotions in an attempt to be objective but in the end, sympathizes with his "devil" friend and accepts him, warts and all.
33 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
Antipathy for the Vampire Squid: Four Decades of Intermittent Contact
By LLM 2007
Given how many shallow, self-indulgent books there are out there with no Gore Vidal, this isn't a bad read, though it's a bad book. Bennett Cerf school, with around two dozen key words droned like mantras to suggest knowledge of flowers, natural rock, French, Italian: "The scent of oleander hung like creative writing degrees over the wisteria tufa allée..."
Pro. There are some good stories here. They are often told with meatpacker grace, listing every Pulitzer Prize long-lister of 1982 who was in the room at the time. But interesting. Did you know that Gay Talese is not "a buffoon" (author Mike doth protest too much) even if his intellectual interests are in fact limited to (i) sexual intercourse with strange women, (ii) tennis and (iii) the lira-to-dollar exchange rate? Did you know how hard it was for one Mickey Knox to procure complimentary Roman fellatio services for the late Burt Lancaster? You do now!
Contra. Spiritual bankruptcy. Bloat. Fair use copyright stretched to the max. Reprints of paragraph after paragraph of other people's writing about Gore Vidal to fill around 190 pages (which FSG binds together with five sheets of blank paper at the back and advertises as "224 pages"). Hypocritical, judgmental, stupid authorial digressions. Many are about booze. Maybe author Mike has alcoholics in his family, which he describes solely as "blue-collar" and as inhabiting America's first "suburban slum". (Although Mike's parents do not appear in the book in any way, he goes on at length about his wife's father, the CEO of Westinghouse--Mike achieved what Gore termed "hypergamy".) Certainly the banshee cries against Gore and demon drink bear no relation to the actual effects of alcohol on Gore, who wrote acclaimed works into his 70s and died at 86. At most Gore's drinking made for bad dinner parties with late-period Gore, no doubt personally embarrassing to Mike. But to hear Mike tell it, Gore drank away his talent and drank himself into an early grave. Not only that, but when Mike had to help drunk Gore stay standing, Mike was strained by Gore's incredible fatness, a subject Mike brings up over and over again.
Remembering the dead as huge bloated fatties, a suspender snapping, pants falling down in front of Walter Matthau's nympho second wife isn't very friendly. This gets us to the book's false and misleading subtitle, "Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal". Mike is a man who documents four decades of intermittent contact with Gore Vidal, mostly on the Roman dinner-party circuit 1975-1989 as part of a larger group of American expats who provided English-language dinner and drinks company for Gore and Howard. Gore, Mike slanders away when not boasting of his Neapolitan dialect mastery, didn't feel comfortable speaking Italian. Later Mike whines repeatedly that neither he nor his expat buddies made it into Gore's memoirs. Perfectly understandable; dinner party navel-gazers are the disposable workplace frenemies of letters.
Even if Mike is not a friend to Gore in death, repeating--as he does everything--that Gore was an angry drunk fat slob, Gore was, as Mike acknowledges more than once, though less often, very generous to Mike. Gore gave pretty young Mike career advice and financial support in the form of sellable interviews and a long free stay in the off-season at Gore's house in Ravello. La Rondinaia had bookshelves running the length of the house, recounts Mike, and Gore told Mike to read whatever he liked, just reshelve it where he found it. Mike says he read...books by Gore Vidal. No information on what interesting books Gore may have had. Facepalm.
And hetero-eye candy Mike suggests--of course repeatedly--that Gore had brain damage from alcoholism. There's some pseudoscientific discussion (brain scan, like, MRI, Korsakoff's, like, Wernicke-Korsakoff, etc.), apparently intended to lend credence to the money demands on Gore's estate brought by his vampire squid half-sister Nini and washed-up half-nephew Burr, the two having emerged from Burberry-lined coffins to accuse Gore of horrific sex crimes after death in the hope of stealing some of his money back from Harvard to avoid the ignominy of working for a living. Mike's own evidence that his "friend" was brain damaged: first, that Gore, in his 80s, acted like a guy in his 80s (angry old man, often rambling, losing his train of thought); second, that Gore's last books contained errors and inconsistencies, like referring to Fellini's Roma as having come out both in 1972 and in 1973.
Talk about the dinged and dented Wal-Mart pot in the aluminum recycling bin calling the mid-century modern kettle black. Mike mentions how he liked to invent and embellish things in his old profiles of Gore, back when he was hard up despite megabucks father-in-law (the truly rich, as Gore said in remarks repeated by Mike, being heartless cheap bastards). Internal evidence suggests Mike didn't stop embellishing in the 1970s, and he includes multiple statements in direct quotes that are suspiciously proleptic. Like Gore and Howard wanting to sell their house for "14 million euros" in 1999, when Italy still had the lira. (Euros became paper money in 2002.) Or Rome 1975, with Gore and Howard praising their pizzeria's delicious "local ingredients", when the local ingredients fad is very 2008-present. Other errors include "prime facie" (prima facie) and "commune" (meaning comune, which is Italian for town, which is the word a good author or editor would have used). Let he who is without brain damage cast the first stone.
This is a shameful, embarrassing book about Gore Vidal, written by a caricature of what Gore termed "our second-rate culture"--a know-it-all American blowhard with a patchy education. Thus Gore says his house is Roman in design, and Mike, who did a couple writing gigs for Architectural Digest, so knows these things, says the house is "more accurately" Islamic in design. Setting aside the architectural continuities in the Mediterranean between Roman and Islamic architecture, Mike puts the reader in the awkward position of deciding who's more reliable about ideas and culture, the late Gore Vidal or an author who is one of the less distinguished, but more acne-free, graduates of DeMatha High School, Hyattsville, Maryland.
This is a book polluted with American attitudes: don't read old books, don't stick your neck out, never have too many friends, bone rich wifey, gotta keep fit, gotta eat right, don't drink too much, Republicans are people too. A friend has asked me if he can read the book now that I'm done with it. Maybe he'll like it more.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Read Vidal, not Mewshaw.
By Stephanie Patterson
I suppose there's quite a lot of "truth" in this remembrance of Gore Vidal He was an alcoholic and more miserable than he needed to be. That said, he wrote some very fine books and essays and he lived to be 86. All the best lines in this book are Vidal's. Mister Meshaw is right about his own writing. He's strictly mid-list.
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw PDF
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw EPub
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw Doc
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw iBooks
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw rtf
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw Mobipocket
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal, by Michael Mewshaw Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment