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A magnificent reconstruction of Napoleon's life and legend written by a distinguished Oxford scholar.
Title: Napoleon
Penguin Publishing Group
Item Number: 9780451627988
Publication Date: October 1966
Product Description: Napoleon
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780451627988
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780451627988
Rating: 3.5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/79/88/9780451627988.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Jennifer D Butler
reviewed Napoleon on May 08, 2018A review of this enjoyable book in three parts: "Why This Book is Ideally Read on a Kindle", "Reading as a Strategy to Snag and Hold onto a Romantic Partner", and "Do I Care?".
Why This Book is Ideally Read on an Ebook Reader
Before launching into some grousing, I would like to thank the inexplicably-named Pickle Partners Publishing for rescuing this pre-electronic-age (1963) book and converting it. As it turns out, happy accidents of technology made this book ideal for my Kindle as currently configured.
I find Popular History to be a very enjoyable genre. Nevertheless I run occasionally into the hunk of non-fic. that self-advertises as for the layperson, but then lets loose with an avalanche of historical, philosophical, geographical, and other categories-ical references that are not usually stored in the easily-accessible parts of the working memory of an average person like self. I assume this sort of book happens when an expert on an era/topic/etc. is commissioned to write a popular history, but he (I think it is frequently enough a male failing to use this pronoun) has spent too long in the ivory tower and has no conception of what the average reader may or may not know about his topic of specialization. I have complained previously on this site that preventing books like this from seeing the light of day should be the responsibility of the editor or somebody else in the publishing racket, but seeing how this phenomenon is at least (2018 - 1963 =) 55 years old now, it seems unlikely that it will go away any time soon.
Happily, a late-model Kindle ebook reader with internet connectivity helps the reader escape from the barrage of inexplicable references that often occur when reading inattentively-edited attempts at Popular History. With wi-fi enabled, I found that, merely by placing one of my sausage-like digits on the offending word, I could, about 75% of the time, get a satisfactory one-paragraph explanation either from the device's onboard dictionary or instant Wikipedia-accessing function. This increased my enjoyment of this book quite a bit. It is otherwise quite readable and gallops along at an enjoyable pace, not surprisingly given the variety of accomplishment in, and action-packed pace of, the life of the titular.
The other 25% of the time, I just mumbled something like "Probably French place" or "Probably Russian general" to myself and moved on.
Reading as a Strategy to Snag and Hold onto a Romantic Partner
Decades ago, I met and got to know the future Long-Suffering Wife (LSW) and quickly decided she was "a keeper" for many reasons, one of which was she seemed much more likely to have a long and well-paying career ahead of her, relieving me of the responsibility of finding and holding a tedious (i.e., any) job for years on end.
The problem was: how to endear myself sufficiently to allow future LSW to somehow gloss over the less attractive aspects of my personality? My working theory was, if I just hold on long enough, she will just simply get used to me and think (like Molly Bloom) "as well him as another". What could I do to ensure she'd keep me around?
At that time, she was a graduate student. When I saw her ridiculously long reading list, I sensed an opportunity to ingratiate myself. I knew I had hit on a winning strategy when she appeared the next day with a great pile of German literature in translation and thrust them at me, saying: "Here, read these and tell me what I think about them."
Lo, the years pass and now LSW finds herself on the delivery end of the education racket, which is to say, she will soon be teaching others, specifically, soldiers. Her future employer gives her a (somewhat shorter than before) list of books the teachers and students are expected to be familiar with. This book is on the list. Having been spared the fate of having to work for a living, I am sufficiently grateful to take this perfectly entertaining book in hand and give her the Cliffs' Notes version. As an additional benefit, this book also gives us something to talk about over evening meals. Making compelling conversation is sometimes a little difficult in the fourth decade of our alliance. LSW didn't even seem to mind the occasional dramatic readings of select passages.
In our far distant past, man hunted and killed animals, and then came home and presented the bloody carcasses to their mates as evidence of their worth as a provider. In our time, the presentation of knowledge to one's beloved can serve the same function, at a far lower level of personal bodily risk, showing that our day and age, while not without its drawbacks, has many happy advantages of which we may not be sufficiently appreciative.
Do I Care?
If anyone ever reads this far, they might be justified in thinking: "Okay, so you met cute a long time ago, why is this in a book review?"
After reading the book under the circs. described previous, I thought, hmm, what exactly are our future military leaders supposed to get out of this book? I answer myself as follows:
A long time ago, the best teacher I ever had (Mr. Cauley) said that Napoleon's Big Idea (which, like many Big Ideas, seems blindingly obvious in retrospect) as a military leader was "concentrate your fire on a single point in the enemy line". This book, published more than ten years before Mr. Cauley told me this, contains the same contention and, I suspect, was directly or indirectly responsible for the idea's appearance in suburban high-school classrooms like mine, years later.
If this Big Idea as I understand it is being taught in military circles, it might lead to two questions:
1) How do you choose the spot to concentrate your fire? In some cases, the answer might be relatively simple, as in a case where the enemy has the lack of foresight to form a line in a V-shape with the pointy end facing toward your army. It seems pretty obvious: attack the pointy end. But what about other circumstances? Do you just choose a spot at random?
perhaps more importantly
2) Does the Big Idea transfer from the literal battlefield of guns and cannons to the metaphorical global battlefield of ideas, diplomacy, hard and soft power, etc.? Should nations concentrate their persuasive powers, charm, diplomats, etc., on a single point on the line between us and them, and then metaphorically fire away? When you are holding Napoleon's hammer, does everything look like a nail?
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