This collection of essays examines the leaders and lunacies of contemporary America, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. Vidal sees as most dangerous of all the "born-again Christians" who see the world in terms of a final cosmic cataclysm, after which only the elect will survive. Vidal is not just a political polemicist and the collection also contains reminiscences of his patrician childhood, appreciations of other writers such as Tennessee Williams, Frederic Prokosch, Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess and Italo Calvino from the present day and past writers such as Henry James, William Dean Howells and Logan Pearsall Smith.