Empire

Warning: While I try to keep these posts as spoiler free as possible, when discussing the later books in a series, it is difficult to avoid spoiling details of the earlier ones (though with Narratives of Empire you will probably get more spoilers from a passable knowledge of American history).

Empire by Gore Vidal is the fourth volume in his Narratives of Empire series chronologically and the fifth published.  At this point, publication order and chronological order will line up for all but the penultimate volume and you can tell that this sets up a little more world building than previous volumes.

Empire is a strong contender for my favorite volume in the series (Lincoln being its strongest competitor) but it introduces my favorite character, Caroline Sanford. She and her brother are the latest descendants of the Schulyer family and they are pitted against each other in the age of yellow journalism.  Her ambition is most of the driving force in the novel and Vidal manages to make her triumphs feel appropriately hard fought.

This volume interested me more because it focused less on the global events at the beginning of the 20th century (though still a fair amount, "Empire" is the title) and more on the social, with which I was less familiar.  I didn't really know much about the Hearst news empire (owned by the child of the villain of Deadwood) and the social struggles around McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt's presidential runs.

As with all the books in the series, you could probably pick it up and start here. However, this one has more connections to the previous volumes than some of the others.  Like the others though, it is a highly enjoyable read steeped in the characters and politics of the time.

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.