These are largely enthusiasts who can easily be imagined commandeering a mudroom to set up Waterloo-to-scale on an old table tennis platform. I'm going to go even further to say that much of the work on Napoleon appears to have been produced by avid, whiskered boys who care more about the wars and the weapons and the testosterone required to mount a campaign to rule the world than they do the finer points of this history. And since Englishmen write most of them? This sets the book apart.
It is rare to find such an even-handed study of Bonaparte coming from an Englishman. In the afterward (penned by Steven Englund), the bulk of the praise goes to Markham's objectivity. This is especially irksome when it comes to the battlefield, where he's fleet enough to hold interest but still manages to sail strategic troop movement and command philosophy like Frisbees over the head. He does fall prey to that habit of experts in a given field, assuming far too often that his reader is aware of the fundamentals. It is comprehensive, well-researched and relatively accessible. Markham's biography stands as one of the more popular works in the Napoleonic oeuvre.
0 kommentar(er)
