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 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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