A solid contribution to early modern French history, this will prove of great interest to readers well versed in Napoleonic...
A study that gives due recognition to Napoleon Bonaparte’s influential but now-forgotten aides.
More books have been written on Napoleon, it is said, than on anyone else except Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ. Woloch (History/Columbia Univ.) acknowledges that there are scores of worthy full-scale biographies of the Corsican revolutionary-turned-tyrant, and he suggests that his readers turn to his only after reading any one of them. His study is a departure from the mainstream; apart from being uncommonly well-written, it urges us to consider that “Napoleon’s saga is not simply the story of a single man” and that his spectacular rise to supreme power came about through the efforts of many hands—from former servants of the monarchy to heroes and villains of the Revolution, from common soldiers and generals to bureaucrats and, of course, ordinary citizens. We know little about those participants in Napoleon’s career, Woloch suggests; apart from the diplomat Talleyrand and the secret policeman Fouché, few of Napoleon’s lieutenants have been given more than passing mention. The author attempts to remedy this by considering the work of various figures (including Boulay de la Meurthe and Théophile Berlier) who held widely divergent political views as republican members of the 1799 legislature but who served Napoleon with equal fervor following the Brumaire coup, as well as those (such as Regnaud de St. Jean d’Angély and Jean-Jacques-Régis Cambacérès) who collaborated with highly placed military officers to assure Napoleon’s transformation from general to consul to emperor, and others (like Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès) who helped Napoleon purge the government of former Jacobins. Unlike the revolutionaries of Robespierre and Danton’s time, Woloch observes, these men were moderate and centrist in inclination, dedicated to the “trappings of legality” and to the supremacy of the state, and shrewd enough to distance themselves from the emperor when his “gilded authoritarianism” became too much for the citizens of France to bear. Able administrators, the author observes that they even served as “a final, residual barrier to unchecked tyranny”—a despotism they helped bring about.
A solid contribution to early modern French history, this will prove of great interest to readers well versed in Napoleonic politics.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05009-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.
Former Dirty Jobs star Rowe serves up a few dozen brief human-interest stories.
Building on his popular podcast, the author “tells some true stories you probably don’t know, about some famous people you probably do.” Some of those stories, he allows, have been subject to correction, just as on his TV show he was “corrected on windmills and oil derricks, coal mines and construction sites, frack tanks, pig farms, slime lines, and lumber mills.” Still, it’s clear that he takes pains to get things right even if he’s not above a few too-obvious groaners, writing about erections (of skyscrapers, that is, and, less elegantly, of pigs) here and Joan Rivers (“the Bonnie Parker of comedy”) there, working the likes of Bob Dylan, William Randolph Hearst, and John Wayne into the discourse. The most charming pieces play on Rowe’s own foibles. In one, he writes of having taken a soft job as a “caretaker”—in quotes—of a country estate with few clear lines of responsibility save, as he reveals, humoring the resident ghost. As the author notes on his website, being a TV host gave him great skills in “talking for long periods without saying anything of substance,” and some of his stories are more filler than compelling narrative. In others, though, he digs deeper, as when he writes of Jason Everman, a rock guitarist who walked away from two spectacularly successful bands (Nirvana and Soundgarden) in order to serve as a special forces operative: “If you thought that Pete Best blew his chance with the Beatles, consider this: the first band Jason bungled sold 30 million records in a single year.” Speaking of rock stars, Rowe does a good job with the oft-repeated matter of Charlie Manson’s brief career as a songwriter: “No one can say if having his song stolen by the Beach Boys pushed Charlie over the edge,” writes the author, but it can’t have helped.
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982130-85-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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