Look elsewhere, though, if you want a broader understanding of Napoleon’s life and career.
An undistinguished entry in the vast library devoted to the French leader.
In this, the first of a projected two-volume biography, Asprey (Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1991, etc.) charts the transformation of Nabolione Buonaparte from the bratty scion (his childhood nickname was Rabulione, “the disturber”) of a middle-class Corsican family to revolutionary firebrand and renowned general. That transformation, the author notes, was accomplished by dint of selfless labor and extremely hard work, though it did not hurt that from childhood Napoleon nursed a vision of himself as a great leader worthy of some future Plutarch. A former Marine officer, Asprey is strong on Napoleon’s military accomplishments and leadership qualities; he notes that the general “treated his crude, often illiterate troops, often dregs of society, like a patient father” and was not averse to getting mud and blood on his tunic. Asprey also proves a knowledgeable guide to the general’s often brilliant (but occasionally misguided) tactics. On matters of diplomacy and sociology, the author is less successful; he does not adequately explain, for instance, why Napoleon was so readily able to win the affections of the people he conquered and thus to export many of the French Revolution’s ideals far afield. Asprey’s prose suffers from floridity (Napoleon had “an independent spirit as wild and free as the wind that pounded waves onto 300 miles of coast”) and metaphorical tone-deafness (“the bubbling pot of political, social, and economic discontent was about to explode into what history knows as the French Revolution”). Such narrative ailments notwithstanding, students of military history—the apparent target audience—will find much to admire in this account, while armchair historians will enjoy the vivid battlefield depictions.
Look elsewhere, though, if you want a broader understanding of Napoleon’s life and career.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-04879-X
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
