Ever since 1821, when he died at age fifty-one on the forlorn and windswept island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte has been remembered as either demi-god or devil incarnate. In The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first volume of a two-volume cradle-to-grave biography, Robert Asprey instead treats him as a human being. Asprey tells this fascinating, tragic tale in lush narrative detail. The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte is an exciting, reckless thrill ride as Asprey charts Napoleon's vertiginous ascent to fame and the height of power. Here is Napoleon as he was-not saint, not sinner, but a man dedicated to and ultimately devoured by his vision of himself, his empire, and his world.

Ever since 1821, when he died at age fifty-one on the forlorn and windswept island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte has been remembered as either demi-god or devil incarnate. In The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first volume of a two-volume cradle-to-grave biography, Robert Asprey instead treats him as a human being. Asprey tells this fascinating, tragic tale in lush narrative detail. The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte is an exciting, reckless thrill ride as Asprey charts Napoleon's vertiginous ascent to fame and the height of power. Here is Napoleon as he was-not saint, not sinner, but a man dedicated to and ultimately devoured by his vision of himself, his empire, and his world.

In his early years, Napoleon was a Corsican nationalist who considered the French to be oppressors. Nevertheless,he was sent to military academies in France, and when he graduated in 1785, at the age of sixteen, he became a second lieutenant in the French army. Napoleon's military career presents a surprising paradox. His genius at tactical manoeuvring was dazzling, and if he were to be judged only by that, he might perhaps be considered the greatest general of all time. In the field of grand strategy, however, he was prone to making gross blunders, such as the invasion of Egypt and Russia. One criterion of a general's greatness is his ability to avoid disastrous errors. It is hard to second-guess the very greatest such as Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, whose armies were never defeated. Because Napoleon was defeated in the end, in 1815, all of his foreign conquests proved ephemeral. This second volume of Robert Asprey's long-awaited biography takes Napoleon from the zenith of his powers to their nadir, and brilliantly places Bonaparte in his full military context.

In this present volume, J. M. Thompson has attempted to tell the story of the rise and fall of a dictator, whilst simplifying the historical background by dealing in turn with each of Napoleon's main spheres of interest: Corsica, Italy, Egypt, Germany, Russia, England.

Charles Dickens famously called the era of the French Revolution the best and worst of times. For 10 years, from 1789 to 1799, France struggled to inaugurate a new European order based on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In the process, men wrote constitutions, women marched for bread, politicians condemned innocent people to death, and a little Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte came to dominate the continent. Read about this remarkable period of European history in The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon.