Industry Reviews
"It is the outstanding merit of Adam Zamoyski's fine new biography, Napoleon: A Life, that he insists on treating his subject as neither a superman nor a monster, but as a creature of his troubled age...Zamoyski gives us...a vivid sense of Napoleon as a protean chancer, outwardly self-confident as any man who ever lived, inwardly always wondering when his 'star' would finally set."--New York Review of Books
"A superb history of a complicated man and time."--Choice
"A masterful historian, Zamoyski fulfills his task eloquently. Napoleon is often called a military and political genius, but in reading Zamoyski, the question arises: how much of Napoleon's perceived greatness was owing...to timing and circumstance in the stormy political world of 18th-century revolutionary France?"--Winnipeg Free Press
"Zamoyski sticks close to verifiable primary sources...What we get is more a historical Napoleon than the colossus of cultural memory, but a figure no less fascinating for that. Napoleon's life was a rollercoaster and Zamoyski takes us along for the ride."--Toronto Star
"Magnificent...Napoleon was neither demon nor deity. He was a man, with great talents and great flaws, often intertwined...[Mr. Zamoyski] writes beautifully."--Economist
"Adam Zamoyski's 700-plus-page but very readable Napoleon: A Life...shows how France's tired post-revolutionary leaders in 1796 recognized they were riding a tiger---but didn't expect him to eat them."--World Magazine
"Engaging and highly readable.... An inclusive life of a historical dynamo."--Washington Times
"Zamoyski...attempts to cut through the fantasy and retrospective exaggeration to tell the story of an extraordinary, but certainly not superhuman life.... Napoleon emerges from Mr. Zamoyski's book a willful, self-made opportunist...gifted, energetic, brave, lucky, but also a bit ridiculous."--Wall Street Journal
A success in all respects, rivaling Andrew Roberts's Napoleon: A Life in astuteness and thoroughness.... The picture that emerges is of an extraordinarily gifted leader who increasingly sought short-term gain at the expense of long-term stability.... Exhaustively researched and engagingly written."--Library Journal, starred review
"Zamoyski tells the personal side of Napoleon's life...his hopes, his dreams, his self-doubts."--New York Journal of Books
"Zamoyski's book is one of the finest biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte ever written."--MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History
"A biography of Napoleon Bonaparte that avoids the well-established military details and gives us the story of a singular man...Illuminating."--Kirkus
"A lifetime's diligent research and profound thinking about Napoleon and his times has gone into this hugely readable, highly enjoyable and well-balanced biography. Zamoyski is at the top of his game as a biographer."--Andrew Roberts, Visiting Professor, Department of War Studies, King's College, London
"Napoleon is an out and out masterpiece and a joy to read."--Sir Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege
"Adam Zamoyski has retold a story that we thought we knew and made it fresh: Stripping away two centuries of mythology, discarding the apocryphal stories and legends, he finally brings us the real Napoleon."--Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
"Always elegant in style and original in analysis. Zamoyski, a master of the sources and of the culture and politics that created his subject, produces a fresh, nuanced, beautifully written, gripping, and outstanding biography of Napoleon that reveals him to be a triumph of luck and accident as much as the invincible genius of the legend."--Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem: the Biography
