Empire
A Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Empire, the fourth novel in Gore Vidal's monumental six-volume chronicle of the American past, is his prodigiously detailed portrait of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century as it begins to emerge as a world power.
------While America struggles to define its destiny, beautiful and ambitious Caroline Sanford fights to control her own fate. One of Vidal's most in-spired creations, she is an embodiment of the complex, vigorous young nation. From the back offices of her Washington newspaper, Caroline confronts the two men who threaten to thwart her ambition: William Randolph Hearst and his protégé, Blaise Sanford, Caroline's half brother. In their struggles for power the lives of brother and sister become intertwined with those of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, as well as Astors, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys--all incarnations of America's Gilded Age.
------"Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer," said The New York Times Book Review. "Like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama."
------With a new Introduction by the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lustbader (The Ninja, Shan) seems here to be attempting a combination of Shogun and The Godfather, with some Ludlum tossed in, but it doesn't work. Philip Doss, assassin for a secret U.S. agency, dies in a car wreck in Hawaii. Top Japanese gangsters, a Japanese business cabal and the U.S. agency all try to discover the culprit. Masashi Taki, head yakuza (Japanese Mafia) has plans to bomb China; the businessmen want to recover a secret diary wthat would expose and ruin them; and the secret agency is trying to find a very high-level mole. Doss's son Michael, painter and martial-arts ace, is recruited by his father's boss to solve the mystery, which, we are told in long flashbacks goes back to 1946 occupied Japan. What seems like a cast of thousands thrashes through 40 years of operatic plot that ends with a plop. We move across the Pacific, the past and the present, but the scenery never changes. Even with all the violence, the cardboard characters and inane plot have as much punch as cotton candy.
