Gore Vidal''s classic novel of Aaron Burr - the man who shot Alexander Hamilton. In 1804 Colonel Aaron Burr Vice-President of the United States shot and killed 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 hypocritical 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-literate slave-owning tyrant. American politics suggests Vidal had a penchant for the vulgar. Even then. Veering backwards to the revolution and the early days of the republic stopping at dinner-parties on the way and reaching forward to the future Burr is a novel about treason both the particular and in general. For what asks Vidal really belongs to whom? What properly belongs to the Constitution to the nation to the family even intriguingly to novelists and historians? . Language: English