A fresh and lively look at the other Napoleon, by London journalist Bresler (Who Killed John Lennon?, 1989, etc.) For all those who know nothing of the Second Empire beyond furniture, Bresler offers a thoroughly enjoyable look at Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, who became first President and then Emperor of France from 1848 to 1870. Bresler begins by elucidating the facts of Napoleon’s birth and pre-birth (Napoleon III’s spawning was orchestrated by his Emperor-uncle, who needed a male heir to the throne, but was unable to conceive one at the time, through an arranged marriage between his stepdaughter and his brother), then covers his childhood and exile in England. The account picks up steam upon Napoleon’s return to France during the tumultuous 1848 revolutions, when he was championed by the monarchists. He was first elected to the Assembly, then to the Presidency, and crowned Emperor when the Constitution was invalidated. Under his reign, France’s economy expanded, Paris was modernized—although he also managed to embroil France in a variety of conflicts including the Crimean War, the annexation of Savoy and Nice, and the thoroughly ill-conceived expedition to Mexico. The perverse masterstroke for which he will forever be remembered was his declaration of war on Prussia, which caused his swift downfall when he showed little of his uncle’s military prowess. Bresler, through his use of both published and unpublished sources, shows Napoleon III to be a brave and compelling leader, a canny politician, and an unselfish sovereign—as one modern critic described him, “a nineteenth-century De Gaulle, dedicated only to fulfilling his country’s greatness.” A fascinating look at Second Empire France and the little-studied “petit-Napoleon.”
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0660-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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