At 300 pages, Markham's biography is necessarily short for such an eventful life. It gave me what I wanted, although it did have plenty of exhausting paragraphs that were little more than lists of battles or political machinations. It felt well balanced in its opinions and was not without interesting insights, but it couldn't really give a sense of Napoleon as a person. Quite an amazing life, for sure.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Felix Markham, Napoleon ***
One encounters Napoleon Bonaparte in many different places. He is the villain in War and Peace, the background villain in the Patrick O'Brien Jack Aubrey novels, the self-satisfied emperor in the huge J.L. David painting at the Louvre. He fought the Turks when he occupied Egypt. He was exiled to the island of Elba, or was it St Helena? Trafalgar, Waterloo, Austerlitz, Josephine. How do all of these glimpses fit together? And how does the Napoleonic era relate to the French Revolution? I wanted to read a biography to find out, especially after our recent trip to Paris.
At 300 pages, Markham's biography is necessarily short for such an eventful life. It gave me what I wanted, although it did have plenty of exhausting paragraphs that were little more than lists of battles or political machinations. It felt well balanced in its opinions and was not without interesting insights, but it couldn't really give a sense of Napoleon as a person. Quite an amazing life, for sure.
At 300 pages, Markham's biography is necessarily short for such an eventful life. It gave me what I wanted, although it did have plenty of exhausting paragraphs that were little more than lists of battles or political machinations. It felt well balanced in its opinions and was not without interesting insights, but it couldn't really give a sense of Napoleon as a person. Quite an amazing life, for sure.
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