Customer Reviews

Napoleon

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I'm sure every biographer of Napoleon aspires to be the one to pin this man down once and for all, to figure him out and deliver him on a platter. Well, it does not happen with this book and even if the author claims that this was never the goal, the attempt is there. The result is a tome that might become increasingly tiresome to anyone who is already familiar with the subject and who does not already harbor a dedicated dislike for Napoleon, and too much for those trying to find a starting point. I would not recommend it to beginner students of Napoleon as it is heavily charged with the largelly negative personal biases and opinions of the author, lacks in specific maps - a necessity when covering a battle in great detail - and assumes the reader has a solid grasp of Europe in the 18th century, particularly France.

McLynn, though calling him a "genius" at times, is hyper-critical of Napoleon as a man, son, husband, step-father and leader - at every stage of his career. His relationships with women are always "misogynistic". With the rest of society, institutions and other powers, invariably "machiavellian" - a word repeated ad nauseam, applicable or not. He is equally censorious of his mother, his wives, his lovers, his brothers, his sisters, his entourage, his friends, his assistants, his bourgeois nobility and his marshals. Did I leave anyone out?

His marshals are singled out for scathing condemnation, marched in front of the firing squad of his pen one by one. Those like Masséna, Ney and Augereau who were "low born" are particular targets. Once riff-raff always riff-raff he seems to be saying.

What made reading this book almost unbearable for me, in the end, are Mr.McLynn's psychoanalytic pretensions. He seems to rely heavily on Jung's speculative rumminations about Napoleon, coming up with novel and often ridiculous (as in "laughable") diagnoses of his own. Thus, Napoleon suffered from every personality disorder and crippling neurosis known to modern mental health professionals, and a few others yet to be discovered; enough for a full psychiatric conference, in fact! In their milder forms, his mental quirks are presented as "complexes". The "Rome complex" for example...Napoleon was interested in ancient Rome but indifferent to the Rome of his own time and, no Gibbon he, never went there. McLynn seriously writes that an "obsession" (another word he loves) with a city one doesn't intend to visit is a "complex". I personally have several then.

His "Oriental complex" is the vague explanation for Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Nothing about European powers keeping an eye on the crumbling Ottoman Empire and the generally held ambition to be the first to take Constantinople. Oddly, the planned invasion of England - which French strategists studied and prepared for long before Napoleon burst on the scene, and something he personally pursued on and off during his career - never rises to the status of an "England complex". But those familiar with complex-nomenclature in general will be happy to find "Oedipal complex" in there too. Of course.

And so on. Annoying also are the puritanical judgments on the mores, or lack thereof, of 1789-1815 French society, which betray a poor ability to understand the period and refrain from veneering it with present values. It has also been observed that some biographies of Napoleon are essays on tyranny as understood by a post-Stalin or post-Hitler world. It's time Napoleon was allowed to return to his own time.

This is the book to grab if you want to know all the important things about Napoleon's life in one book without having to worry about becoming bogged down with too much information.

You will not be a Napoleonic expert after reading the book but you will have learned about all the significant events in Napoleon's life to be able to speak intelligently about them on a general level. This book should be enough for those who have a casual interest in Napoleon, but should also serve as a great starting point for those who want to learn more. For instance, the campaign in Russia is given good coverage in the book but left me yearning for more so one of my next purchases will be a book that deals specifically with the Russian campaign. Fortunately, there are great books out there for nearly every siginificant battle and event that Napoleon was in so this book is a great primer for those. Thanks to this book I've now picked out several other books to read on Napoleon, Nelson, Louis Davout and more.

One of the great things about the book is how easy it is to read. McLynn writes straightforwardly but interestingly. The pages fly by. McLynn does use a lot of words that you don't see every day so keep a dictionary handy. Words like "tatterdemalion" were certainly new to me, but its nice to learn some new vocabulary.

McLynn does engage in a fair amount of speculation about some of the events in Napoleon's life and of Napoleon's motives. Most of the theories advanced, such as McLynn's belief that Napoleon was probably poisoned instead of dying of the officially given reason of stomach cancer, are not outrageous because they have supporting facts. More troubling for some, though not me, may be the psychoanalysis that McLynn engages in. McLynn really tries to get at some of the psychological bases for some of Napoleon's actions and while that may be an impossible task the book does not suffer for it. You can agree or disagree but again, the explanations are not outlandish.

The book is a well-balanced treatment of Napoleon overall. It is not hagiographic as the author makes it clear that he does not view Napoloen as the greatest military leader ever. McLynn acknowledges that Napoleon was largely untouchable from 1796-1805, working military magic at times, but also sets out the repeated mistakes Napoleon made, such as failure to account for the weather in battle, that meant fewer victories after 1805. McLynn makes judgments on Napoleon but all of them seem fair, even if one disagrees with some of them. All in all the facts are laid out clearly so you can make up your own mind.

The book does a great job of trying to cover all the significant events and chapters in Napoleon's life. The book covers all the important military campaigns, including the reasons for going to war, but also provides excellent coverage of Napoleon's youth in Corsica, his marriages and affairs, his time on St. Helena, his economic policies and political and diplomatic strategies.

Most importantly I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It gave me an excellent one volume history of Napoleon while being interesting at the same time.

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.

For some reason the book by Adam Schom has drawn all the recent attention for his biography of Napoleon. Yet Mclynn has written a well balanced and informative history of the period. Unlike Schom, McLynn looks beyond the military biography to grasp the social and political essence of the age.

His work on the Code Napoleon and the impact of the contintental system shows an historian who can maintain narrative flow while keeping an eye on detail.

I cannot think of a better introduction to study of Napoleon. It is both balanced and fair in its assessment of the man.

This is a decent biography but nothing really groundbreaking. However in his conclusion, discussing Napoleon as a military commander, McLynn claims that he should not be counted among the great( peerless )commanders in history. I wonder where he got that. Napoleon fought more battles than Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, and Frederick the Great combined and won all but a handful of them. No other commander in military history fought more battles under more different conditions than he did.

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.

I frankly couldn't finish the book, although I did read the beginning, his youth, and the end, and skimmed the middle. I was so put off by the psychobabble that pervades nearly every sentence of the biography of this man that I found it impossible to go on. It felt like being in a high school class just introduced to Freud, Jung et al. The author actually talks about Napoleon's short stature as an impetus to his need to succeed...the first sentence of the book I thought was tongue in cheek (to the effect of Napoleon was not a real person but a creation of the French nation's need for blood after the age of reason ---paraphrasing). But no...its all like that. His mother is powerful and controlling, his father is weak and emasculated...he hates his older brother and repressed it, therefore, the rest of Europe will suffer because he holds in what he would like to do to his older brother but cannot. And on and on. Does anyone still write and talk this way?

I have read two other biographies of Napoleon, and felt like this work adds nicely to the literature on his life. McLynn provides rich detail on most aspects of his life, as well as insightful analysis. My only complaint involves his brief interjections of psychoanalytic interpretations of Napoleon's psyche, especially from the Jungian perspective. Although I feel that these interpretations are valid, they need to be either described in detail or not at all. All in all, however, I would recommend this book both to serious Napoleon students and those reading about him for the first time.

McLynn knows his stuff inside out! Unfortunately, the novice or intermediate academist in the Napoleonic era may not know it as well. Meaning, although McLean writes in an interesting style, much of it involves details that are not explained well enough to a novice of this era and Napolean. He writes about the intimate details of Napolean, Josephine, Joseph, countless other characters and their mistresses and paramours. He uses many lines of quotations and letters that are not footnoted, but gives the multiple references for each chapter at the end of the book.
He describes Napolean's juxtaposition in and after the French Revolution marvelously. I think I finally understand how Napolean fit in to the revolution and what happened in France during and afterward. Although the revolution is not the focus of any of the book.
McLynn does not go into much military detail about any of Napolean's campaigns, just the basics. Napolean's grand strategy and tactics seems to be emphasized. I was dissapointed in the lack of maps. I found 3 only, 1 of Europe, 1 of Austerlitz, and 1 of the Russia campaign.
I did enjoy reading the book and I learned a lot. It could have been better with more maps and a little more explanation about the concomitant 18th century European cultures and world events. The best aspects of the book were the many short interpretations of the just described events found in each chapter by an expert like Frank McLynn. Thank you for writing it!

As the title indicates, the book is "a biography" of Napoleon, one more to join the likely thousands written since his death and, like many, highly speculative in some respects. A welcome touch is that it adds considerably to our knowledge of Napoleon's formative years, childhood, stint at Brienne, and involvement with Paoli in Corsican affairs. The military campaigns are described thoroughly, almost hour by hour (I recommend a map nearby, or an Osprey book companion) and constitute the one aspect of the book that makes it outstanding. A great deal, however, is in the take-it-or-leave camp.

I did not appreciate the attempts at psychoanalysis. Some "insights" are simply thrown in..."there were already indications of his bisexuality" (really? when? how?) or gleaned from the clearly speculative, at a great remove diagnoses of others - Jung, Freud, Adler, inter alia. They become annoying, as does his over-use of the term "Machiavellian", to the point of rendering it meaningless; I'd like to remind readers that in the shifting sands 1789-1795 France, that description would fit almost anyone who struggled to survive by cunning and calculation, as many did. He often describes Napoleon's attitude to women as misogyny, that is, one of hatred. At worst Napoleon disliked certain types of women and was cavalier in his treatment of others, something not untypical of men in general, but to call it "hatred" is going a too far. In that vein, the author's own attitudes are curious to say the least. Women like Josephine and Pauline, who used sex as a tool for survival and/or happened to like it become "nymphomaniacs" under his pen; women who aspired to an intellectual life, such as Germaine de Stael, are described as "pushy" and "pedant".

Rather unforgivable (and astonishing in a serious writer) is the author's inclusion of certain malicious items of gossip with, incredibly, the addendum (also malicious) that there may have been a basis for it after all. So, as a glaring example, the English-sourced bit of calumny that Napoleon fathered Hortense's first child is given some credit by McLynn by the fact Napoleon grieved over the death of the boy. Napoleon loved Josephine's children as his own and it was perfectly natural that he would mourn the death of his first step-grandson (and nephew, since he was also Louis's son) I guess natural human responses are not allowed Napoleon!

Annoyances apart, the book is good mainly, if not solely, for its excellent treatment of the military side of things.