Reviews for The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte V3

The average rating for The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte V3 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-10-06 00:00:00 Lea Porter Otto von Habsburg went to his eternal reward in the summer of 2011, after a long lifetime of service to Europe. As Pretender to the Throne of the Dual Monarchy, as journalist -- for he had to earn his living and did so splendidly -- as leader of the conservative Pan-European Movement, and as "Mr. Europe," the most distinguished Member of the European, whose interventions in Parliament addressed foreign policy, the rights of the elderly (he himself began his Parliamentary career past the age of retirement) to fishing rights and a plethora of other matters great and small, the great Archduke lived a life of tireless service in the cause of European unification and peace. Had the Austro-Hungarian Empire not been dissolved, he would have been monarch over much of Central Europe, from Poland down to the Balkans and from northeast Italy across the Hungarian plains. Brilliantly educated as a child in Austrian and Hungarian pre-university studies, speaker of seven languages, residing through the course of his life in Austria, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the United States, and Bavaria, His Imperial and Royal Highness, although deprived of the Crown that had been his family's for centuries, nevertheless lived the Dynasty's vocation to unify Crown lands while respecting the religious, cultural, and linguistic differences of all the peoples of that Crown, and, eventually, of all Europeans, while living to the full all the implications, personal and social, of the Catholic Faith. Gordon Brook-Shepherd has rendered an important service. Author of several books on Austrian and Central European history, and sympathetic to the Habsburg cause, he presents a history that is the distillation of a lifetime of study. Granted access to the Habsburg Family's private archives, he presents a book rich in details unavailable in the many other sources he cites as references in his short but useful bibliographic note. For anyone interested in twentieth-century European history, the twentieth-century history of Austria and of Central Europe, and in the ways deposed monarchs and their descendants continue to serve their nations and all peoples, this is an indispensable read.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-12-28 00:00:00 Tim Taylor Though I have always thought of myself as an Irishman, one of my Great-Grandfathers was born a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His name was Josef Ettl, and he came from Neusiedl-Am-See, which at that time was technically in Hungary but since 1920 has been in Austria. I never knew him well, since he died when I was 9 years old, but I remember clearly making my first halting attempts to speak German because he was much more comfortable in that language. For this reason, and others as well, I find the History of the Dual Monarchy to be fascinating. It makes a nice change of pace from the History of more modern times. Having said that, this book does not deal only, or even primarily, with the old Empire. Erzherzog Otto von Habsburg-Lothringen is very much a man of his time, and that time stretches across the 20th century and into the 21st. It is rare to find a public, much less political, person who is wholly admirable and without major and glaring flaws of character, but I believe Erzherzog Otto is an exception to that rule. The only criticism I have of this book is that it could have been much more detailed, particularly in reference to the later career of its subject.