A hardy few may find value here. Others may want to dust off their copies of War and Peace and The Age of Napoleon.
Second installment of the two-part biography begun in The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (2000), long on data but short on interpretation.
Military historian and former marine officer Asprey knows tactics, orders of battle, and the smell of gunpowder, expertise that serves him well in writing of Napoleon’s skills on the battlefield. He is less at home, though, with the realpolitische implications of those battles and with the ideals that drove Napoleon, who wanted nothing less than to effect the creation of a league of states across the continent that would live and breathe by the ideals of the French Revolution—with himself, of course, at the head. Asprey acknowledges some of Napoleon’s civilian successes: the building of ports, orphanages, hospitals, and canals; the beautification of Paris and other cities; his devotion to public health and order. But it is General Bonaparte who captures the author’s admiration and attention, and the most successful portions here offer neat summaries of the great clashes at places like Borodino, where, Asprey writes with a cataloguer’s precision, “French cannon alone fired 90,000 balls, French muskets nearly two million rounds, firepower answered in kind by the Russians”; Wagram, where French forces managed to squeeze out a victory over Austria despite having lost their commanding general and mistakenly slaughtered their Saxon allies; and, of course, Waterloo, where a number of small errors, harmless enough in themselves, combined to cost France victory. To get at those summaries, however, readers must brave cannonades of pointless verbiage (“Napoleon deemed Austerlitz ‘a decisive victory’ without perhaps realizing that decisive is a finite adjective with a limited lifespan”) and such weird metaphors as, “From Napoleon’s standpoint it was a pretty enough canvas. Unfortunately it had the major defect that its colors would retain luster only by repeated coats of costly force.”
A hardy few may find value here. Others may want to dust off their copies of War and Peace and The Age of Napoleon.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-00481-4
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
