Among the plethora of Napoleon biographies, this is immensely engaging for lay readers.
This first in a two-part biography does an excellent job of delineating the emotional and intellectual development of the Corsican general–turned–French emperor.
English historian Broers (Western European History/Oxford Univ.; Napoleon's Other War: Bandits, Rebels and Their Pursuers in the Age of Revolutions, 2010, etc.) offers a wonderful sense of the genius—and man—who was so stunningly able to remake European boundaries and mores after the meltdown from the French Revolution. In this first volume, the author moves from Napoleon’s idyllic years growing up in Corsica to his being chased out of the “cradle” with his mother and family for running afoul of the republicans in 1793. He eventually washed up on the shores of the Riviera and was able to make his career mark in the army with the siege of Toulon. The “politics of survival” dictated the years to follow, up to 1765, but Broers astutely points out that Napoleon was the last generation of supremely and classically well-read leaders (a group that includes Thomas Jefferson) and that his advance in the military, as well as within a heavily striated society, was largely the result of his diligent, ongoing efforts at self-improvement. Working from the “still emerging,” unexpurgated correspondence (which reaches the year 1809) being compiled by the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, under the direction of distinguished French historian Thierry Lentz, the author offers some exciting character observations. Napoleon had an eye for catching talent—he adored and elevated his very worthy stepchildren, Hortense and Eugène—while tolerating the outrageous shenanigans of many members of his family. From his previous work, Broers is well-attuned to how Napoleon fashioned his conquest and administration of Italy: “amalgamation” and “rallying to the new regime.” His proto-empire then allowed a swift and efficient system of wider reforms in France after the coup.
Among the plethora of Napoleon biographies, this is immensely engaging for lay readers.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-872-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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