Napoleon

Rating:
Summary: A biography worthy of its subject
Review: McLynn's biography of Napoleon has everything you could ask for in a biography. It is a lucidly written book that is at once entertaining and informing. It is a balanced account of Napoleon Bonaparte's life. Very rarely does McLynn's passion of his subject come in the way of the reading although you do sense that he is passionate about his subject.

The book is deep and assumes a fair bit of knowledge that I did not already have. My interest in Napoleon's life and accomplishments was superficial at first, lured mostly by a blurry mystique that surrounds Napoleon's historical person. While reading the book I found it helpful to refer to the web to read up on specifics of military history and strategy as well as french culture. Unfortunately, McLynn does not help much to alleviate the need for looking up words and phrases. For instance, I wish he had referred to blackjack as "blackjack" instead of vingt-et-un. But again, this added to the character of the biography and in the end I appreciated it.

I also found McLynn's occasional attempts at psychoanalysis (favouring Jungian perspectives) to add to the flavour of the book-he made sense of a lot of loose ends this way.

Perhaps I could say that there was more that I would have hoped to read about in the book. I wish there was more about Napoleon's time at St. Helena and a bit more about his everyday comings and goings at other points in his life. However the book being the tome that it is already covered enough ground to make me very satisfied with what I read and moreover it spurred curiousity into the subject.

Overall I would highly recommend this book as a biography of Napoleon. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.


Rating:
Summary: Interesting and occasionally surprising
Review: Mr. McLynn's book confirms my long held view that a fair account of a great man's life (well, shall we say a famous man, because opinions on Napoleon's supposed greatness may differ...) is better approached through a biographer who does not emanate from the same country. Although I read somewhere that Mr. McLynn is supposed to be "worshipping at the shrine", I found his biography thoroughly fair and balanced, very well written, constantly interesting and free of the rubbish very often found in French books on Napoleon. For sure, there are some Freudian explanations of Napoleon's attitudes, which appear somewhat speculative (why, for example, should the young Bonaparte have been "ambivalent" towards Louis XVI just because of his supposed attitude toward a protector who may or may not have gone to bed with Laetizia Buonaparte?). Other points are funny and entertaining, such as a comparison between the infamous Fouché and....J. Edgar HOOVER!!
Napoleon's military skills are frankly acknowledged, but so are his tendencies to sudden depression and the story of his campaigns is told with precision, yet the reader is never lost in the minutiae of some strategy. One may have wished for a few more maps but here is a very good biography, easily read, well written and entertaining, which can be highly recommended to anyone with a general interest in this strange Corsican, whose similarities with his sinister twentieth century successor (Adolf Hitler) are indeed striking.

Rating:
Summary: A brief comment
Review: Napolean was a fascinating and contradictory personality, and McLlynn has done a fine job of capturing both the more intimate, private Napoleon as well as the public Napoleon who was the instigator of great historical events. As McLynn says, "He liked to strike people of both sexes, to slap them, pull their hair, pinch their ears and tweak their noses." He was also, according to the author, an intolerant prude, a sadist, as well as a shrewd strategist and charismatic leader. But McLynn also does a fine job of putting Napoleon's achievements and failures in the social context of the times, showing how Napoleon's brief career set the pattern for much of what was to happen politically and militarily in Europe for the rest of the century.

I did have one minor nitpick, however, which has to do with Napoleon's ultimately disastrous march on Moscow in 1812.

One of the reasons it failed was due to epidemic typhus caused by the parasite, Rickettsia prowazeckii, which ran rampant in Napoleon's army and killed 1/3 of his men. This rarely gets discussed much in the histories like this one but deserves to be more well-known. As someone with an interest in both history and the history of science, I think this sort of story makes for fascinating reading also, but as I said, too often it doesn't get covered in the histories.

Another interesting thing is that Napoleon's chef invented canning food under heat and pressure in champagne bottles--which could withstand the pressures of reheating--basically not so different from the way you make corned beef, which is also retorched (reheated) in the can. This process kept the food germ-free and prevented spoilage due to bacteria, and was one of the main reasons why Napoleon could field and provision an army of a quarter of a million men in the early 1800's.

Overall, however, a detailed, well-written and fascinating book on a historical figure who continues to be of interest both to professional historians and history buffs alike.

Rating:
Summary: World Spirit on horseback?
Review: This meticulous chronicle of the drift of Revolution into Empire wastes little time on the Myth, a la Hegel's world spirit on horseback, with an acute portrait of the psychology of the man, who actually was unsentimentally the more extraordinary in the middle of the collosal reversal, in the dramatic sense, of the tragic plot. Although psychoanalyis can derail when applied to history, the occasional touches of Freudian insight in the book are apt and put the account in a keynote of the classic black and white photograph. Military hollywood won't absolve Napoleon to much of a consolidator of the Revolution, even he preempts the shadowy Bourbons and the overhead vultures of reaction. The mystique of the man is belied by the cost of human life in such quixotic escapades with military toys. The human cost puts the Hero in the category of war criminal even as we can see Napoleon was no Stalin like figure, and if anything far too lenient on the subversions of his own camp, among them sly Talleyrand, who very promptly senses the turning point, and deserts the 'winner' turning into a loser. Napoleon the military strategist is carefully followed, and comes in as less than an Alexander, whatever his strategic genius, that simply failed him in the audacity of the monumentally misconceived invasion of Russia, to say nothing of the Egyptian campaign and the guerilla defeat in Spain. The invasion of Russia was such a gross blunder of stepping over the abyss with a half million men and this against the commonsense of all his generals that one is left with a snapshot of a Macbeth.