Other opinionated observers—Paul Johnson, Charles Esdaile, Alan Schom—consider Napoleon a self-absorbed opportunist plagued...
More books have been written with Napoleon (1769-1821) in the title than there have been days since his death, writes prolific historian and Napoleonic Institute fellow Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, 2011, etc.) in this 800-page doorstop. Entirely conventional and mostly admiring, it fills no great need, but few readers will complain.
After his early years in the backwater of Corsica, Napoleon’s influential father sent him to France at the age of 9 to learn French and be educated in an elite military academy. An obscure officer when the revolution broke out in 1789, he left his post to spend most of those years in a complex factional struggle in Corsica, which he ultimately lost. He fled to France in 1793, a penniless but fiercely ambitious artillery captain. Six years later, already a national hero after a brilliant campaign in Italy, he engineered a coup that made him dictator. For the next 15 years, except for a brief armistice, his armies rampaged through Europe, mostly crushing opposing forces until he overreached in Spain and Russia and went down to defeat and humiliating exile. “Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment,” writes the author, “over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven. For any general, of any age, this was an extraordinary record.” Readers will find this book to be a long but mostly pleasant reading experience, although some will doubt that Napoleon “saved the best aspects of the Revolution, discarded the worst, and ensured that even when the Bourbons were restored they could not return to the Ancient Regime.”
Other opinionated observers—Paul Johnson, Charles Esdaile, Alan Schom—consider Napoleon a self-absorbed opportunist plagued by his incompetent economics, pugnacious foreign policy, totalitarian government and massive propaganda, but Roberts offers a solid reconsideration.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0670025329
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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