Napoleon: The Path to Power | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Dwyer
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  55 reviews
Sales Rank: 208868
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 672
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.9
ISBN: 0300137540
Dewey Decimal Number: 944.05092
EAN: 9780300137545
ASIN: 0300137540
Publication Date: March 27, 2008
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Product Description
At just thirty years of age, Napoleon Bonaparte ruled the most powerful country in Europe. But the journey that led him there was neither inevitable nor smooth. This authoritative biography focuses on the evolution of Napoleon as a leader and debunks many of the myths that are often repeated about him—sensational myths often propagated by Napoleon himself. Here, Philip Dwyer sheds new light on Napoleon’s inner life—especially his darker side and his passions—to reveal a ruthless, manipulative, driven man whose character has been disguised by the public image he carefully fashioned to suit the purposes of his ambition. Dwyer focuses acutely on Napoleon’s formative years, from his Corsican origins to his French education, from his melancholy youth to his flirtation with radicals of the French Revolution, from his first military campaigns in Italy and Egypt to the political-military coup that brought him to power in 1799. One of the first truly modern politicians, Napoleon was a master of “spin,” using the media to project an idealized image of himself. Dwyer’s biography of the young Napoleon provides a fascinating new perspective on one of the great figures of modern history.
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 solid biography September 19, 2008
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.
 Lots of Detail September 17, 2008
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.
Astute Opportunism: Bonaparte's Marching Order for Supreme Command August 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 A Path Lost in Meanderings June 19, 2008
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
 Disappointing May 31, 2008
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
This biography is dry as dust. All the principle individuals are two dimensional. The writer writes as if they were stick figures rather than real people who influenced the course of history. His protrait of Napoleon is without flesh and blood.
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