A rigorous contribution to the literature surrounding Bonaparte and his time.
An all-encompassing study of the Napoleonic era and the man who gave it its name.
If battles were won with footnotes, this would be a modern Austerlitz. To judge by his abundant citations, freelance historian and author Englund (Grace of Monaco, 1984, etc.) has a firm command of the literature, and particularly the French literature, surrounding Napoleon; this alone sets his account apart from slighter studies that have appeared in recent years, full of interpretations but slight on documentation. Unlike many modern authors, Englund spends little time worrying over Bonaparte’s capabilities as a lover or his legendary bad temper; instead, he delivers a capable, focused study of the rise (and eventual fall) as a state- and empire-building political creature the likes of which Europe had not seen since Alexander’s day. But not a sui generis creature: Englund skillfully ties Napoleon’s rise to the brief moment when Corsica was an independent nation determined to have its day in the sun, as well as carefully examining Napoleon’s determined, endless quest for legitimacy as a ruler, “largely his own rationale for aggressive (and childish) behavior,” which helps explain many of the curious political decisions he made as First Consul. He also takes issue with current theories that Napoleon was poisoned by his lieutenant, Montholon, in exile on St. Helena, arguing after examining the evidence that “Occam’s razor . . . would logically slice off any recourse to the poisoning thesis.” Englund is a stylish writer, even if he’s guilty of occasionally unfortunate prose along the lines of “The year 1800 was still a time when ‘the best and the brightest’ and the ‘politically correct’ looked with fervent approval on what today would be labeled ‘colonial imperialism.’ ” Moreover, he keeps a complex narrative on course, doing a fine job of showing just why so many Europeans of Napoleon’s day revered him—and why his renown has endured.
A rigorous contribution to the literature surrounding Bonaparte and his time.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-87142-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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