Empire: A Novel

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. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Fictional creation Caroline Sanford, owner of the Washington Tribune, is the central character in this historical novel that focuses on late 19th/early 20th century America's emergence as a global power. A well-written tale in the tradition of the author's Burr and 1876, it encompasses the Spanish-American War of 1898, U.S. takeover of the Philippines, President McKinley's assassination, and the stormy presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Interesting and well-developed real-life characters abound, including, most memorably, Secretary of State and Lincoln's old friend John Hay. Intermixed with the well-researched backdrop of historical characters and events is Caroline's personal story. The fifth novel in Vidal's ``American Chronicle'' series, this is yet another winner. Highly recommended. BOMC main selection.James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

With this fourth and most effervescent entry into his American Chronicle (Burr, 1876, Lincoln), Vidal has concocted a fine champagne of historical fiction that plucks a lush heroine off the Krantz/Sheldon/Steel vine--a brainy beauty who angles her way to the pinnacle of newspaperdom--and bottles her in the glittering world of imperial America, vintage 1900. A brood of real-lifers tromp around heroine Caroline Sanford in this snob's epic, linking her charmed life with that of the nation at large. As the novel begins over a silver-service dinner in London, well-born Caroline shyly trades ripostes with expatriate author Henry James, US Ambassador to Britain John Hay, and Henry Adams of the Adamses. These three eiders form a kind of Greek chorus whose sage observations periodically punctuate the narrative, providing moral counterweight to the heady world of money and power into which Caroline--and Vidal--plunge. At the center of this world are two ambitious men, two superb characters--legendary newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt--both avid supporters of the American Empire, whose reach into Cuba, the Philippines, and Panama constitutes the backdrop against which Vidal daubs his heroine's life. Caroline's tie to Hearst comes via her half-brother Blaise, who dupes her out of her share of their inheritance in order to invest the monies in Hearstian ventures. Riled, Caroline rounds up cash to buy a paper of her own, the flagging Washington Tribune, with which she out-sensationalizes Hearst--who's here depicted as an amoral swine. Surfing a tide of yellow ink to Olympian heights, she lunches with Astors and Vanderbilts, and makes pals with Alice Roosevelt and her dad Teddy, a human dynamo who steals every scene he's in. Along the way, she gets engaged (but her fiancÉ takes a tumble and dies); gets married (but not to the man she loves); and takes a lover (by whom she has a son). By novel's end, she's rich and happy, and America seems to be too; but as Vidal offers through Hearst's mouth in the last bit of dialogue, ""True history. . .is the final fiction."" This lightest of Vidal's historicals is intelligent, sophisticated entertainment, a giddy amalgam of fact and imagination that, while short on profundity, dazzles. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Fictional creation Caroline Sanford, owner of the Washington Tribune, is the central character in this historical novel that focuses on late 19th/early 20th century America's emergence as a global power. A well-written tale in the tradition of the author's Burr and 1876, it encompasses the Spanish-American War of 1898, U.S. takeover of the Philippines, President McKinley's assassination, and the stormy presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Interesting and well-developed real-life characters abound, including, most memorably, Secretary of State and Lincoln's old friend John Hay. Intermixed with the well-researched backdrop of historical characters and events is Caroline's personal story. The fifth novel in Vidal's ``American Chronicle'' series, this is yet another winner. Highly recommended. BOMC main selection.James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col. Copyright 1987 Cahners Business Information.

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. (May) Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.

If the fifth volume in Vidal's bestselling American Saga seems formula perfected, at least Vidal's formula is to offer a delightfully entertaining, elegantly written novel that finds the author stylishly mixing real and imaginary characters, as he has in previous volumes of his history of the nation as seen through the life of one American family, ancestors of the Sanfords, the newspaper family first introduced in Washington, D.C., published 20 years ago. Blaise Sanford and his half-sister Caroline are the fictional protagonists in Empire, which sets the scene for that earlier novel and collects both the historical and fictional strands woven through Burr, 1876 and Lincoln. Empire probes the typically Vidalian underside of the presidencies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt during the years after the Spanish-American War until 1906, when the U.S. replaced Britain as the world's greatest imperial power. The brilliantly characterized William Randolph Hearst (Blaise's mentor in the newspaper business) joins Vidal's vividly detailed gallery of historical rogues, along with the two presidents and, most interestingly of all, Henry Adams and Henry James, the historian and novelist Vidal appears to model himself on, who are paid serious, if deliciously off-color, homage. Vidal continues successfully to mine the ore that has turned him into America's premier historical novelist. 200,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC main selection; author tour. (June 16) Copyright 1987 Cahners Business Information.