Author: Ira Katz

I, an American, have been living in the Paris region for almost ten years.  In the age of the internet, keeping up with events and reading in English is not difficult. But finding books is a bit more complicated. Don’t misunderstand, I can and have read a few books in French. The most challenging was Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, that I chose to read because he had lived in my suburb Meudon, southwest of Paris. Perhaps the most interesting book I read in French is Le Vengeur,  by Hungarian born Imré Kovacs.  Kovacs died after being a … Continue reading →

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Empire is one of a series of seven novels written by Gore Vidal chronicling American history; set in the years 1898 to 1907, it is the fourth in the series chronologically (but fifth in terms of publication, 1987).  Reading this story of the dawn of the US overseas empire following the Spanish-American war, I perceived interesting parallels with today’s political scene of our now decadent empire.  Though I can certainly recommend Empire, this is not a review, here I only intend to illustrate Vidal’s sense of the historical moment through a few of select passages and make the comparison to current … Continue reading →