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Article: Books in Brief.("Napoleon")(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- June 3, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Napoleon, by Paul Johnson (Viking, 190 pp., $19.95)
Johnson, the British historian renowned for such monumental surveys as A History of the Jews and Modern Times, narrows his focus in his most recent work, a slender biography of Napoleon. This splendid addition to the Penguin Lives series offers a comprehensive view of Napoleon in all of his incarnations: as an ambitious Corsican youngster, opportunistic revolutionary, invincible general, overreaching emperor, rapacious lover, and, finally, impotent exile. Johnson's pithy and devastating judgments, reminiscent of Tacitus -- e.g., "Warfare, from being a means to an end, became an end in itself, and Bonaparte, ...