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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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