What is it about this story? The contrast between this fabled man and his very real footprint upon our history that we find so compelling? Yes, the stakes are high, measured as they irrefutably are, in the mass graves of an entire generation. Yet there is an underdog. Everybody loves an underdog. It is an epic tale whose veracity is chiseled into the very bedrock of Western Civilization by a solitary man -- who's only truth is his own fiction.Be she ever so humble, Ruth Scurr is here to tell us.And tell us she does: Napoleon's shooting star is a story told a thousand times; now a sort of Egyptian funerary barge orbiting on a cosmic sea of ink while the man, the little red geni that he is, who would affirm it all, amor fati, sinks into the shadows of deep space. --"I live for posterity."Best to look away from all the bling....cast our eyes to the ground.For it is the earth, the nurturing soil, from which springs all life on earth--and verily our own afterlife (if we are counting, as our esteemed author boldly does... rainbows). To "tend one's garden", Voltaire concludes. And so does, in the end, on his rocky island prison, in his ambitious little plot of prepared soil,...part personal paradise, part battlefield,... does this new Caesar, this modern world-beating Charlemagne: "Dig the ground! Yes, doctor you are right, I will dig the ground". And the rainbow falls back to earth.So much of what science knows it knows from looking....away. Of the Heavens, observing the filtered after-effects, by-products from the origins of time itself--lest by staring into the sun we go bind. Truth lurks in shadows. Photographs require camera obscuras. Apertures nested in mirrors Colors beyond the spectrum of human vision. Our hero is nothing if not a kaleidoscope! To confess, I never thought we'd get a truly great book on Napoleon from either Brittian or France (they all seem to think he was French for starters!) and I initially dismissed this one out of hand: Planting straw? Surely this is the straw too far?! But, do not believe for a minute this a is a book about gardening. That it would come from that "nation of gardeners" should be no objection. And then, by woman's hand?The author raises the point: to paraphrase, "Napoleon and women don't mix." That has proven out! She believes however this gives her special drawing rights. And it does! Indeed, I will see her wager and raise the stakes! We are now past the point, if there ever was, that man can write a truly "definitive" bio on our all-conquering Corsican hero. This was true even before Waterloo. Call it the "Wellington Effect"....all men grow in stature when we bring Napoleon to rein. There's no getting around it. Even in defeat we are risen up! Just looj to old Blucher! As for the good Duke himself?, His obsession did not end at Waterloo. He would proceed to fashion a new red coat out of Napoleon's horse... track down and ph*k the two mistresses of the L'Emporeur he could find; and, last but not least, ensconce Canova's Trajan redux casting of the Little Corporal, naked, standing fully 7ft, in the foyer of his English manor. Even Tolstoy, labouring mightilty to reshape the very notion of history to account, and "explain away," his people's tormentor, wound up.... another "war hero."No! There is a reason, a fixed and present reason, why this greatest of all the Western World's Rorschach Tests grips us so. Ruth Scurr's story is compelling as much for its depth and breadth as it is for the purity of its rainbow. It is an arc most each and every one of us can imagine ourselves on--or, truer to the rub of it, NOT on--denying ourselves. The Shire is on to something here. Be she ever so humble, our recalcitrant heroine has pulled out her spade and, digging away under that old hybridized oak The God of Mars left us, she scrapes up against buried treasure.I eagerly await the sequel. ;)