Napoleon has fascinated William Nester since he was a boy. During a dozen years living in Europe, he visited most of Napoleon’s palaces and battlefields. For this biography, he carefully read all of Napoleon’s memoirs and 40,108 letters. His book captures Napoleon’s complexity, paradoxes, contradictions, accomplishments, catastrophes, and genius. William Nester, a Professor at the Department of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, is the author of more than forty books. His book George Rogers Clark: I Glory in War won the Army Historical Foundation's best biography award, and Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon, won the 2016 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award.
I wrote...
Napoleon and the Art of Leadership: How a Flawed Genius Changed the History of Europe and the World
No one in history has provoked more controversy than Napoleon Bonaparte. Two centuries after his death those who love or hate him still debate his legacy. Was he an enlightened ruler or brutal tyrant? Was he an insatiable warmonger or a defender of France against the aggression of the other great powers, especially Britain and Austria? He remains fascinating both because he so dramatically changed the course of history and had such a complex, paradoxical character.
If the art of power is about getting what one wants, then Napoleon was among history’s greatest masters. He understood and asserted the dynamic relationship among military, economic, diplomatic, technological, cultural, psychological, and thus political power. No previous book has explored deeper or broader into his seething labyrinth of a mind.
War and Peace is not just the greatest novel of the Napoleonic Era, but among the greatest novels ever written. This vivid translation best captures the complexities of Tolstoy’s characters and their dilemmas amidst epic military campaigns that determine the fate of Europe and countless lives. The web of stories linking the characters are as much about friendship and love as they are about war and peace.
From the award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov comes this magnificent new translation of Tolstoy's masterwork.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
War and Peacebroadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both…
David
Chandler’s Campaigns of Napoleon remains the very best overview with its
brilliant scholarship, analysis, and writing. For each campaign, Chandler
analyzes the dynamic among logistics, strategy, and tactics while explaining
rivalries, wars, and alliances elsewhere across Europe and beyond. Campaigns
of Napoleon is as great an epic and classic read as Tolstoy’s War and
Peace.
Describes every campaign and every battle which Napoleon personally conducted. It contains descriptions of tactics, logistics, topography, weaponry, casualties, the roles of individuals under Napoleon's command or against him. Has pull-out map of Napoleon's 1798 voyage to Egypt and Nelson's chase.
John Elting’s Swords Around a Throne is the
best exploration of Napoleon’s army including organization, logistics,
strategy, tactics, uniforms, training, weapons, equipment, discipline, and
recreation, written with insight, sympathy, and humor. The book reveals the
continuities and changes from the Revolution to Waterloo. Elting enlivens this
work with numerous vivid excerpts from journals and letters by those who
actually made the history, from generals to privates.
This authoritative, comprehensive, and enthralling book describes and analyzes Napoleon's most powerful weapon,the Grande Armee which at its peak numbered over a million soldiers. Elting examines every facet of this incredibly complex human machine: its organization, command system, logistics, weapons, tactics, discipline, recreation, mobile hospitals, camp followers, and more. From the army's formation out of the turmoil of Revolutionary France through its swift conquests of vast territories across Europe to its legendary death at Waterloo, this book uses excerpts from soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts, and numerous firsthand details to place the reader in the boots of Napoleon's conscripts and generals.…
The Anatomy of Glory tells the epic story of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard with keen prose that reads like a novel. It raises the key question of whether by creating an elite force of his best soldiers, he weakened his line infantry regiments, cavalry squadrons, and artillery batteries that he drew them from. He refused to commit his Old Guard at Borodino; had he done so he likely would have transformed a marginal victory into a decisive victory. He did send in his Old Guard at Waterloo only to see British regular regiments rout them.
With a New Introduction By Col. John R. Elting (USA, ret.) The glory of the Imperial Guard resounds above all others in the annals of war. Created, built and nurtured as a bodyguard for Napoleon, it grew from a brigade of fewer than two thousand men into a virtual army, and became 'a human fortress which no one but [Napoleon] could dominate and no enemy could penetrate'. And, on such battlefields as Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Wagram and Waterloo, it won the laurels of undying fame. Written by France's foremost historian of the Napoleonic Wars, Commandant Henry Lachouque, and translated and…
Philip Haythornthwaite’s Napoleonic Source Bookis a comprehensive overview of the army and navy commanders, campaigns, regiments, uniforms, and weapons of not just the great powers, but every state that fought in the Napoleonic Era. The 200 or so illustrations and maps, and the 700 entry glossary are first-rate.
This illustrated guide provides, in an accessible, narrative format, information on the Napoleonic period. Over 100 anecdotes of the era, contemporary illustrations and mapwork are presented.
On the expertise I claim only a deep interest in history, leadership, and social history. After some thirty-six years in the fire and emergency services I can, I think, claim to have seen the best and the worst of human behaviour and condition. History, particularly naval history, has always been one of my interests and the Battle of Jutland is a truly fascinating study in the importance of communication between the leader and every level between him/her and the people performing whatever task is required. In my own career, on a very much smaller scale, this is a lesson every officer learns very quickly.
Captain Heron finds himself embroiled in a conflict that threatens to bring down the world order he is sworn to defend when a secretive Consortium seeks to undermine the World Treaty Organisation and the democracies it represents as he oversees the building and commissioning of a new starship.
When the Consortium employs an assassin from the Pantheon, it becomes personal.
Captain James Heron First Into the Fray: Prequel to Harry Heron Into the Unknown of the Harry Heron Series
The year is 2202, and the recently widowed Captain James Heron is appointed to stand by his next command, the starship NECS Vanguard, while she is being built. He and his team soon discover that they are battling the Consortium, a shadowy corporate group that seeks to steal the specs for the ship’s new super weapon. The Consortium hires the Pantheon, a mysterious espionage agency, to do their dirty work as they lay plans to take down the Fleet and gain supreme power on an intergalactic scale. When Pantheon Agent Bast and her team kidnap Felicity Rowanberg, a Fleet agent…
