A masterful portrait, staggeringly complete and contradictory and fluently translated—a delight to read.
Wonderfully lyrical, historically nuanced exploration of the irruption of this Romantic hero.
In this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume biography of the “magician” who was Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), French scholar Gueniffey (Director of Studies/L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) places the patriot and dictator squarely at the center of unprecedented historical events—not for hagiographic purposes but for the sheer fascination of examining this self-willed character. In his first book in English translation, the author carefully delineates Napoleon's humble upbringing in Corsica to the declaration of Consulate for Life in 1802, from canny officer and negotiator for his extended family’s benefactors to single-minded workhorse and consolidator of centralized power. Throughout the book, Gueniffey allows the countless authors before him to range about the narrative—Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Taine, Emerson, Jacques Bainville and many more. For Gueniffey, there is an obvious joy to the historiographic journey. Having witnessed the excesses of the Revolution, Napoleon came down on the side of “law, tranquility and all the established authorities”; having pressed for Corsican emancipation, he and his family were banished in 1793. Marrying Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1796 was a way to establish French nationality that education could not afford him. His defeat of the British at Toulon set him on his course; as the author astutely observes, Napoleon was “born in war.” In search of a future, he worked tirelessly and imaginatively, often ill, and he was frugal, solitary and bourgeois. Across a consistently illuminating narrative, Gueniffey sifts his subject’s defining achievements of this period—e.g., concord with the Catholic Church (after the rupture of the Revolution) and establishment of a civil code, which confirmed his reputation as a legislator.
A masterful portrait, staggeringly complete and contradictory and fluently translated—a delight to read.Pub Date: April 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-36835-4
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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