by Michael Broers ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2018
Readers will eagerly await the third volume.
The second of three volumes in the author’s sweeping biography of the legendary general and emperor.
Throughout the book, Broers (Western European History/Oxford Univ.; Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny, 2015, etc.) delivers page-turning accounts of the many military engagements of the time. Beginning with Austerlitz, he points out how the superior training of the French army gave them an advantage, producing a Grande Armée that could outmatch any other. Napoleon called for separate columns marching along parallel paths, sufficiently separated that they would be able to resupply from the surrounding countryside rather than waiting for supply trains. He could assess and deploy his formations as events developed. The Russian, Austrian, and British armies devised a plan of action, but there was no commander in chief; this lack of leadership proved fatal. Napoleon’s men were immensely loyal to him, even if they grumbled. He went among them before a battle, encouraging bravery, revealing his trust, taking them into his confidence, and offering the respect due to good soldiers and intelligent free men. Austerlitz was a new kind of undertaking for him, as he had to lead more men over a vast theater outside the normal campaign season. But as the author shows, not all his battles were that successful. Napoleon ran into trouble in the far reaches of his empire and in bad weather, floods, and impassable terrain. He also committed his greatest error in Spain and Italy, dismissing guerrilla warfare. His overreliance on his siblings, especially Joseph, worked against him. Joseph flourished as an official in Paris, but he failed miserably in Italy and Spain. As in the first book, Broers provides an excellent character study of Napoleon. He shows how his subject’s loathing of the Bourbons and the Catholic Church colored the actions of an otherwise steady leader, and he declares his intelligence was matched by few other leaders, among them Alexander I, Thomas Jefferson, and Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Readers will eagerly await the third volume.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-669-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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