An illuminating, easy-to-read, warts-and-all biography of one of history’s most significant figures.
A biography of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) that avoids the well-established military details and gives us the story of a singular man.
In a lengthy but highly readable narrative, Zamoyski (Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848, 2014, etc.) eschews a standard history of battles and instead describes a brilliant student and voracious reader. Well-trained at the École Militaire in Paris, he became an artillery officer but took leave from his regiment to help establish Corsica’s independence; he showed his talents first at the Siege of Toulon at age 24. He was brave and indefatigable but tended to disregard superiors and bypass instructions, and he escaped discipline with judicious use of flattery. During the Revolution, his well-led troops successfully stopped the mob at the Tuileries, and he was put in charge of the Army of Italy. His soldiers’ best qualities were their abilities to march quickly and live off the land. They succeeded with poor supply lines, operating in small, self-contained units with strong feelings of honor and love of glory. Throughout his life, Napoleon took propaganda to new levels, fabricating battles and enemy losses. As the author shows, he was a master tactician but no strategist. He never had a solid plan and took his daring to the limits of temerity. He was diminutive and projected an awkward manner and complete lack of grace. However, he possessed an extraordinary ability to inspire his armies. With his establishment as First Consul in 1799, he was determined to make France great, with the Napoleonic code, a stable economy, and a state so well-grounded that when his regime ended, the change occurred without chaos. Of course, his military glory and the vast empire he built from 1799 to 1815 went to his head, and the young Republican quickly transformed himself into an imperious emperor.
An illuminating, easy-to-read, warts-and-all biography of one of history’s most significant figures.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-05593-7
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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