For students of military history and tactics, this is a modest addition to the huge library devoted to Napoleon. But for...
The Little Corporal goes love-happy and receives little but scorn for his troubles.
Napoleon had plenty of excuses for not having been a dynamo in the boudoir: after all, he had a world to conquer, and affairs of state took precedence over affairs of the heart. Even so, he found plenty of time to chase women, some of whom left distinctly unflattering accounts of his performance and endowments—accounts that have found their way into the Napoleonic folklore and given rise to some scurrilous slanders and deliciously unprintable limericks. Hibbert, distinguished biographer of Europe’s royals and nobles (Wellington: A Personal History, 1997, etc.), writes sympathetically of his subject while acknowledging the justice of some of those complaints. He writes that even Napoleon himself remarked, “I don’t like women very much. . . . I take them and forget them,” and, as one of his contemporaries reported, “He seldom said anything agreeable to women . . . and frequently made the rudest and most extraordinary remarks. To one he would say, ‘Good heavens, how red your arms are,’ or to another, ‘What an ugly hat!’ Or he might say, ‘Your dress is rather dirty. Don’t you ever change your clothes?’ ” Yet women, Hibbert writes, played an important role in Napoleon’s life, from his mother, who did much to form his imperious and quick-tempered character, to his “little Creole” Josephine, whom he divorced because she could not bear him an heir but whom he loved as no other, from the prostitute who initiated him as a young officer to the wives of the English and French officers who kept an eye on him while imprisoned on St. Helena. Napoleon emerges in Hibbert’s account as a tightly wrapped bundle of neuroses, capable of a strange tenderness and of outrageously bad manners—all of which allows us to see Napoleon as a flawed and wounded human, an aspect little encountered elsewhere.
For students of military history and tactics, this is a modest addition to the huge library devoted to Napoleon. But for general readers, it’s a pleasure, full of well-chosen information and juicy anecdotes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-393-05202-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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