Despite an evident distaste for his subject, Johnson’s sharp-edged view of Napoleon is well supported, and well worth...
The glory of France and the erstwhile Whig hero comes up short in this biography by a historian of decidedly Tory bent.
It seems a rarity these days to find a biography of Napoleon that does not glorify the Corsican revolutionary. Johnson (The Renaissance, 2000, etc.) surely does not. Instead, he writes, the defeat of Napoleon and the subsequent Congress of Vienna are to be counted among the great accomplishments of modern history, ushering in an era of peace that would not end for nearly a century with the outbreak of WWI—when, he asserts, the modern cult of Napoleon began. Had Napoleon committed his campaigns of conquest today, Johnson further asserts, he “would have been obliged to face a war crimes tribunal, with an inevitable verdict of ‘guilty’ and a sentence of death or life imprisonment.” Reckoning that Napoleon’s dream of empire cost four or five million lives and incalculable destruction of property, Johnson lays at his door blame for a number of sins, including the “deification of force and war, the all-powerful centralized state, the use of cultural propaganda to apotheosize the autocrat, the marshaling of entire peoples in the pursuit of personal and ideological power.” In brief, Johnson charges, Napoleon was less a liberator of Europe than a dictator of the sort that would follow in the century afterward—a Hitler or Mussolini for his day. The author recognizes Napoleon’s talents as a commander and bravery—throughout his career, he reckons, Napoleon had 19 horses shot out from under him in battle—but still has little use for the fellow, unlike more enthusiastic recent biographers such as Frank McLynn (see below) and Robert Asprey.
Despite an evident distaste for his subject, Johnson’s sharp-edged view of Napoleon is well supported, and well worth considering.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03078-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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