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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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