Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 944.05092
EAN: 9780300137545
ISBN: 0300137540
Label: Yale University Press
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 672
Publication Date: 2008-03-27
Publisher: Yale University Press
Studio: Yale University Press

(20080326)

Customer Rating:
Summary: Excels in two historical niches
Comment: Highly recommended for two types of readers:

1) For students of Napoleon, this is an extremely important contribution. Dwyer fleshes out the transition of Napoleon the Corsican youth to the most powerful man in France in 1799 as First Consul; a path not even expected late into 1799 given Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, the person that solicited Napoleon's support, expected that designation. Dywer's most important contribution to this ear is to strip away much of the propaganda that surrounds Napoleon to reach the true character of Napoleon; much of this propaganda was created by Napoleon himself to serve his political ambitions, which leads into the second niche Dwyer brilliantly services. . .

2) "Path to Power" serves as an excellent analysis of political ambition acted upon by a successful military leader. Military leaders who have political ambitions along with political scientists trying to understand how political capital can be developed by military leaders are both well-served.

The sometimes incredibly detailed deconstruction of previously reported falsehoods make this book a difficult read for general leaders who are probably better served with a more general biography of Napoleon; though I would argue to wait until other historians who write narratives of Napoleon have a chance to develop a work using the findings Dwyer lays out in this much more accurate portrayal of the young Napoleon and his rise to power.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: solid biography
Comment: I am a relative newcomer to Napoleon, having read only Paul Johnson's short biography in the Penguin Lives series, so I can't really assess Dwyer's arguments against recent scholarship and historiography, except to say that he supports his case with an impressive amount of research. Is the book written with the grace of David McCullough and Edmund Morris or even, to use a more academic example, James McPherson? No. But this is a readable academic-type biography, certainly worthy of the Yale imprimatur, and it whets the appetite for more about this imposing figure of European and world history.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Lots of Detail
Comment:
Most historians have to chose between writing a readable narrative or one that will be heavily documented. Dwyer doean't have this problem His writing is able straddle both styles. He has created a readable, heavily documented history of Napoleon's rise to power. I don't know the literature of this period, but the book has the feel that it is definitive to date.

While the text is not on the page turning level of Alexander Hamilton, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (the first 2/3) or Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa, it is engaging and keeps the interest of the general reader.

Most interesting to me were the Italian and Egyptian campaigns, and Napoleon's relationships with his parents, siblings and wife.

One of the overriding themes is Napoleon's propaganda which certainly sets the stage for what we have today. There were no TV crews in Egypt so Napoleon had a blank slate to write on. He could send dispatches to his brothers' newspapers, and who c/would dispute him? He could march his troops, triumphantly into Paris, who's to know it wasn't a total victory?

Dwyer assembles a lot of information and I look forward to what I presume will be volumes 2, 3 and maybe even 4.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Astute Opportunism: Bonaparte's Marching Order for Supreme Command
Comment: In "Napoleon: The Path To Power," Philip Dwyer successfully brings to life the first three decades in the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte. Readers who have a pre-existing knowledge of Bonaparte and his time will be the ones who will benefit the most from reading Dwyer's book. To his credit, Dwyer neither glorifies nor demonizes Bonaparte.

Dwyer clearly explores the contradictions in the character of Bonaparte. Bonaparte started as a Corsican nationalist, then morphed into a servant of the French Revolution, and ended up as an imperialist who became supremely confident in his own personal destiny. Bonaparte transformed himself into what he has been remembered for because of his unmatched exploitation of the opportunities that he saw before him. Dwyer also shows with much conviction the active role that Bonaparte played in his own mythmaking.

Although Bonaparte was talented, intelligent, and passionate, he was also a ruthless man. Bonaparte regarded people as pawns in his political and military calculations, to get rid of if they could no longer be useful. As Dwyer observes with much pertinence, that callousness towards the lives of others is not unusual in the character of a leading public personality. The more power a public figure amasses, the greater the indifference he / she will often display.

To summarize, "Napoleon: The Path To Power" is a nice addition to the library of any person fond of history.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Path Lost in Meanderings
Comment: This is a book for the serious Buonapartiste - particularly his secret detractors. The Sorbonne-educated historian has given us PART ONE of his work - a work of over 600 pages - and I found the deluge of historical materials to be both overwhelming and deftly handled, the resolution to this paradox being that Dwyer is guilty of what he demonstrates behind Napoleon's ascent: a clumsy spin doctoring of the "facts."

This also is the reason I find fault with the very conception of the book: we long have reconciled ourselves to remaining trapped within the vortices of history, myth, and cultural creationism when it comes to this particular biographical subject. Unable to break the historian's taboo of psychoanalytic consideration of its subject, this book ultimately is a doomed enterprise as yet another attempt at "understanding" the man.

I wait for the biography that tells us something new about how the man's context, the history/myth/culture that he found himself in, struggled against, and, in this case, to great extent, found itself transformed in his wake. Our obsession with the little giant certainly would favor this approach.

Peter Glidden, Ph.D.

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