A thoroughly detailed scholarly work, somewhat repetitious and not for the merely curious or casual reader. For professional...
Editor Colson (History/Universite de Namur, Belgium) closely examines the military concepts and strategies of “the greatest warrior of all time,” whose “mastery of mass warfare and his ability to raise, organize, and equip numerous armies dramatically changed the art of war.”
The author has a masterful knowledge of military history, strategy, and tactics, and he uses the structure of Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz’s reflections on the Napoleonic Wars, On War, inserting Napoleon’s writings on subjects such as the nature, theory, and strategy of war and explanations of engagement, attack, and defense. In doing so, Colson exhibits the similarities of their considerations on the theory and character of war, even as the infantryman, Clausewitz, and the artilleryman, Napoleon, disagreed on the importance of their elements. The author prioritizes ideas over events as he writes about Napoleon’s understanding of war and how he viewed it over the years. Colson points out that peace was incompatible with his personality, likely because it included trust and self-limitation. Napoleon felt that monarchy was, by nature, at war against republics. His views on battle are easy to grasp: attack should be swift and simple; artillery should open lanes for infantry; and moral strength, not numbers, determines victory. Napoleon personifies Clausewitz’s formula: political objective determines military objective. As he writes about grand tactics and Napoleon’s views of his troops, Colson succeeds in portraying Napoleon’s military genius as well as his broad intellectual abilities. Napoleon himself said that the qualities essential in a general are an educated intuition and determination. His readings supplied the former, and the latter was part of his natural character. Napoleon envisioned all possibilities and was prepared to adapt, though his victories were less decisive after 1809 because other armies copied his methods.
A thoroughly detailed scholarly work, somewhat repetitious and not for the merely curious or casual reader. For professional military historians and theorists, however, it should be highly useful.Pub Date: July 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-968556-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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