THE LAST EMPIRE: Essays 1992-2000, by Gore Vidal.
Lost in the review is an appreciation for the charming essays forming the first third of "The Last Empire".
Mr Basaev matter-of-factly refers to Russia as "the last empire built on blood".In this section Italy's government soldiers on, but for how long?
GORE VIDAL'S new book, "The Last Empire," contains 48 essays, four or five of which are quite good -- lively, instructive, lucid and amusing.
Cixi, who is blamed for the downfall of China's last empire, is said to have executed disfavored scholars and to have enjoyed a parlor game that involved her maids slapping one another in the face.
Even the immigrants and foreign goods that so worry some Americans are tributes to that appeal (by contrast, the last empire to build a wall on its border, the Soviet one, was trying to keep its subjects in).
Written like a good thriller, The Last Empire recounts how chance events and quirky personalities led within a few months in 1991 to the disintegration of the empire built and maintained by generations of Russian tsars and Soviet apparatchiks.
Football in places like Penn State is the last empire, and Paterno is one of the last emperors, along with Bobby Bowden at Florida State and John Gagliardi at St . Johns College in Minnesota.
In his review of "The Last Empire" (July 1), Gore Vidal's latest essay collection, Paul Berman accuses Vidal of "slipping... into what seems to be one or another obsessive mania... the first and most insistent of... which is the horribleness of Abraham Lincoln".
Left essentially unchallenged was the United States, the last empire standing.
