This book by Gore Vidal is banned in the US, «the most liberal country in the world», from the considerations of censorship. Gore Vidal is an American novelist, dramatist, and essayist. The other day Russian translation of the book was published in Russia.

GORE VIDAL is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and a memoir. He was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and brought up in Washington, D.C. He enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen and served as first mate on an army ship in the Bering Sea, where he wrote his first book, Williwaw. In the sixties, three praised novels established Vidal's reputation as a bestselling author: Julian (1964); Washington, D.C. (1967); and Myra Breckinridge (1968). His collected essays, United States, won the National Book Award in 1993. In 1995 he published a memoir, Palimpsest, which the Sunday Times called 'one of the best first-person accounts of this century we are likely to get'.

Gore Vidal is also famous for saga novels from the American history. Such as «1876», «The Empire», «Hollywood», and «Golden Age». In his comparatively small publication he is trying to understand why America, the United States that is, is hated so much throughout the world, which in turn the Americans are trying so hard to make better.

The book also gives a detailed analysis of Timothy McVey’s act, who hated the American administration more than Osama Ben Laden does. In his last word Timothy McVey was not going to make excuses. Instead, he quoted Brandeis, a member of the Supreme Court, who wrote that the US government is a mighty and energetic mentor. «For better or worse, it is teaching the entire nation with its example». As a man with a rare sense of humor, McVey wanted to say that with his bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City he was just copying the actions of the US government towards its fellow citizens, like the way they dealt with the religious commune Branch of Davidians, where 127 people were killed.

Gore Vidal comes to a conclusion that if an ordinary American can follow the example of its government, then why not foreigners like Osama Ben Laden? And there are more than enough of examples to learn from. Since 1949 until the present the US has conducted nearly 300 military incursions into the territories of other countries. Not counting CIA operations like overthrowing Mosaddik in Iran or Aliende in Chile.

Percentage-wise the number of the September 11 victims is small compared to the number of people killed all around the world on the approval from the US administration. By the way, in his book he quotes the words of Timothy McVeigh when McVeigh says that when he was in Iraq, he surprisingly discovered that Iraqis are «normal people like you and me». He said that by using lies the US government is making the soldiers kill Iraqis and protect Kuwait, where people are getting raped and killed. «The war awakened me».

Another «Desert Storm» is now coming up. I wonder how many more potential McVeighs will appear as a result.

So why the entire world dislikes the US so much? Gore Vidal comes to a conclusion that it’s not even as much of the fascist-like attitude of the US administration towards not only its fellow citizens but towards the rest of the world, as the bureaucratic madness of the decline of the Roman Empire. The author says that fifty years ago Harry Truman replaced the old republic with the state of national security, whose only goal is eternal war, whether it is a hot war, a cold war, or a little warm one.