Readers will eagerly await the third volume.
The second of three volumes in the author’s sweeping biography of the legendary general and emperor.
Throughout the book, Broers (Western European History/Oxford Univ.; Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny, 2015, etc.) delivers page-turning accounts of the many military engagements of the time. Beginning with Austerlitz, he points out how the superior training of the French army gave them an advantage, producing a Grande Armée that could outmatch any other. Napoleon called for separate columns marching along parallel paths, sufficiently separated that they would be able to resupply from the surrounding countryside rather than waiting for supply trains. He could assess and deploy his formations as events developed. The Russian, Austrian, and British armies devised a plan of action, but there was no commander in chief; this lack of leadership proved fatal. Napoleon’s men were immensely loyal to him, even if they grumbled. He went among them before a battle, encouraging bravery, revealing his trust, taking them into his confidence, and offering the respect due to good soldiers and intelligent free men. Austerlitz was a new kind of undertaking for him, as he had to lead more men over a vast theater outside the normal campaign season. But as the author shows, not all his battles were that successful. Napoleon ran into trouble in the far reaches of his empire and in bad weather, floods, and impassable terrain. He also committed his greatest error in Spain and Italy, dismissing guerrilla warfare. His overreliance on his siblings, especially Joseph, worked against him. Joseph flourished as an official in Paris, but he failed miserably in Italy and Spain. As in the first book, Broers provides an excellent character study of Napoleon. He shows how his subject’s loathing of the Bourbons and the Catholic Church colored the actions of an otherwise steady leader, and he declares his intelligence was matched by few other leaders, among them Alexander I, Thomas Jefferson, and Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Readers will eagerly await the third volume.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-669-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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