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 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
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