The Golden Age
Narratives of Empire • Book 7
by Gore Vidal
Narrated by Anne Twomey
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Vidal spent six novels building to this — his final, most damning case that America's so-called Golden Age was the exact moment it stopped being a republic.
- Great if you want: political cynicism rooted in real history and real names
- Listening experience: dense and deliberate — rewards attention, punishes distraction
- Narration: Twomey's composed, literary tone suits Vidal's patrician voice well
- Skip if: you haven't read earlier Narratives of Empire books — payoff suffers
About This Audiobook
The seventh and final volume of Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire follows Caroline Sanford and her nephew Peter through the world-historical events of 1939 to 1954, from the political maneuvering that drew America into the Second World War to the Cold War's transformation of the republic into an empire. Vidal draws on his own family connections to the Washington power world to place his fictional characters at dinner with Roosevelt, Truman, and the architects of postwar American hegemony, always asking the same skeptical question about the cost of greatness.
Anne Twomey narrates with the patrician authority that Vidal's prose demands, capturing the world of old Washington money and political sophistication that he renders with such insider precision. Her performance handles the historical sweep and the intimate social comedy with equal assurance, and her voice gives the novel's historical figures their period-appropriate weight. The audiobook's length suits Vidal's ambition: this is history as experienced by the people who watched it made.
