Dimensions
200 x 130 x 33mm
In 1804, Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, shot and killed General 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, hypnocritical 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-literatue slave-owning tyrant. American politics, suggests Vidal, had a penchant for the vulgar. Even then.
