An open-minded, cleareyed view of a man who manifested the best and the worst of his species.
Forrest (Modern History/Univ. of York; Paris, the Provinces and the French Revolution, 2004, etc.) offers a balanced view of one of history’s most complex and controversial characters.
The author seeks not only to show us Napoleon the man, but also Napoleon the player in a vast drama in which he was a principal but not the only player. Forrest begins with the hoopla attending the return of Napoleon’s remains to Paris in 1840 (he’d been interred on St. Helena when he died in 1821). Then, the author backtracks to Corsica and Napoleon’s boyhood, education and military training, the revolution and his emergence as a gifted military strategist and officer. Forrest shows us Napoleon’s voracious reading habits, his patronage of artists and writers, and his ability to identify gifted administrators and marshals. But we also see his congenital inability to delegate, a fault caused by “his arrogance and his complete faith in his own abilities.” The author traces Napoleon’s political rise from consul to emperor and tries to communicate concisely the intricate political alliances in Europe—alliances that at first propelled him into power but eventually led to Waterloo. The author argues that Napoleon’s “Continental System” (imposing French ways everywhere) was “a strategic error” that alienated potential and actual allies. Forrest praises Napoleon for some things—the legal codes, the emphasis on education, the support of scholarly research, especially in Egypt—but as the story advances, all is overwhelmed by the cascades of blood flowing from the battlefields he loved.
An open-minded, cleareyed view of a man who manifested the best and the worst of his species.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00903-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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