Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

This is a sweeping, almost lush, detailed and comprehensive story of one of the greatest Military and political leaders and thinkers of world history, told with great skill, sensitivity but without sentimentality and without pulling any punches: We get to see Napoleon in the raw, warts and all. One gets the impression that Mr. Schom has lost his taste for the heroic image of Napoleon and has replaced it with a more realistic one based on "deeply honed" research into his life. Nowhere have I ever seen such an ambitious project pulled off so well. It covers Napoleon's life from cradle to grave. It covers his thinking during all of his various military campaigns, the military triumphs and the strategic and tactical failures. It covers Napoleon's brooding reaction to his mistakes and his elation to his foreordained victories. It covers the conflicts and romps with all of his wives and his many female consorts. It covers the feuds with his family and with his general staff, his personality flaws and his lack of sensitivity to his soldiers and to the great harm his campaigns did to the peoples of the lands he conquered. We get a front row seat into the mind and the actions of one of the foremost heroes of Western History. Altogether this is a thoroughly engrossing although not the most balanced book; yet it will endure. There may be better books "out there" on Napoleon, but I doubt if there are any as complete as this one. We must be grateful to Alan Schom for the prodigious effort exerted to produce this masterpiece of a tome. It is the one book on Napoleon that is a must read. Five Stars and Amen.

This is a tremendous work with so much information it is difficult to take it all in. There are opposing views of course regarding Napoleon and this one is probably more negative than many, but still very well written and exciting. Of special interest is the details regarding Napoleon's interaction with his family. This is like something out of a Novel rather than history. I recommend it.

In his preface to this superb biography, Alan Schom tells us that, as an American, he felt better grounded for an objective biography of Napoleon Bonaparte than most European writers because, even after two centuries, most of them remain too emotionally involved with the subject. Be that as it may, objectivity does not mean neutrality, and Professor Schom's account gives the reader nothing much to admire about this powerful figure other than his inexhaustible energy and his destructive genius. We learn little about Napoleon's childhood, in part because there doesn't seem to have been much to it. We first encounter him at age nine already embarking from his native Corsica for a military school in France where he was being essentially abandoned by his father. Aloof, insecure, and friendless at the school, he displays little of his latent brilliance beyond a certain precocious intellectual curiosity, mainly the areas of mathematics and political history. One of the keys to Napoleon's later success was his ability to seize opportunity for himself in the most unpromising of circumstances, and this flair reveals itself as soon as he graduates from the school and takes his first assignment as a junior artillery officer in the French army. Combining military successes with a gift for self-promotion, Napoleon quickly attracts notice. Crawling as it was with self-serving opportunists, revolutionary France was to prove fertile ground for the young solder's talents as he advanced rapidly under the patronage of men who believed they could make use of him for their own ends. He soon achieved fame as a military hero, and with that came potential political power, which he was quick to exploit. Napoleon always lacked the patience for strategic planning and was forever getting himself into hopeless binds that only his extraordinary tactical instincts and his brashness were able to rescue him from. Oafish blunders and stunning masterstrokes alike permeated his career, and he never seemed to learn from his mistakes so much as bluster his way through them as though they had never happened. Grasping the decrepitude of the revolutionary government, he swept it aside, along with his erstwhile patrons, in a poorly planned but successful coup d'etat that was the starting point for 15 years of horrendous conquest and intrigue at the peak of which he ruled most of Europe. As with most of the legendary conquerors in history, Napoleon's fatal weakness was the insatiable nature of his ambition, and the eventual over-extension of his power was inevitable. It finally happened in the brutal expanses of Russia, after which the hapless European powers were able to rouse themselves to encircle and crush him. Even then, he escapes his exile to rally another army and take Paris one last time, but Waterloo found him shortly thereafter. This biography provides only glimpses of Napoleon's private life. His life-long devotion to he sluttish yet somehow innocent Josephine seems to

Mr. Schom has put together a scholarly work that gives the reader a very clear and concise view of the Napoleanic Era. I was drawn to the book after viewing the recent PBS documentary dealing with Napolean's rise to power. The documentary was imbued with scholars and historian (many of whom were French), who regarded Napolean, as what I perceived to be, the savior of his generation. After reading this book I found a more realistic and even-handed viewpoint which I believe to be a truer perspective of the man. Bonaparte's life was that of the eternal warrior whose sole existence was that of placing his country and people into continual and unmitigating conflict. In creating the Grand Armee, whose footsteps were heard in every corner of Europe from 1800-1815, he was responsible for the loss of millions of lives, the effects of which were to resonate will into the twentieth century. In fact one could argue that the Franco-Prussian War(1870) and World War I (1914) were attributable to the long- standing hatred that was forged during Napolean's reign. The Empire under Napolean highlights a police state that would have made both Hitler and Stalin envious. Under the guidance of Joseph Fouche, we have the paradigm of the latter day KGB, where any and all plots were uncovered and dissention was dealt with summarily. Greed and indifference were the hallmark of Napolean rule and the plight of the common Frenchman were ever present in his endless taxation and unrelenting conscription of France's youth. My early history classes often pointed out Napolean's efforts to consoldiate Europe as necessary act of seemingly universal beneficence. The Napoleanic Code was always a compelling and persuasive argument for the case that Bonaparte was merely acting on behalf of world order. One would have to be naive and totally devoid of reason to dismiss the fact that much of Bonaparte's goal was the pursuit of power and the ultimate enrichment of himself, his family and his idolators. The tendency of history to glorify past wars and the exploits of their protagonists are often the consequence of the passage of time. We see the past in rose-colored glasses; especially when the events relate to a nation who we presently regard as an ally and friend. That being said, it is still difficult to place Napolean along side present day villians such as Pol Pot or Milosevic, but yet his reign culminated in the destruction of lives and property that make those two look like juvenile delinquents!! Although I initially sought the Napolean depicted in the PBS program I found quite a different character in this well-researched and thorough book. Mr. Schom is to be commended for his resolve in demystifying Napolean and bringing forth the true nature of tyranny and oppression which he wrought! I found the writing wonderful and very accessible, each chapter unraveling the ev