Philip Dwyer

Lots of essays critiquing Steven Pinker’s argument that things are generally getting better in terms of human violence, some more successful than others. (If you count violence against the environment, for example, matters look different, or emotional violence—but I might actually not want to count the latter.) Still, interesting points about how violence varies across cultures; how Pinker way overstates the physical violence of prehistorical and medieval periods; and other relevant considerations. For example, comparing homicide rates to those in the medieval era in which there were no antibiotics and no understanding of things like sudden infant death syndrome, for which mothers were often blamed, does not make a lot of sense as a measure of relative rates of violence.… (meer)

The epilogue of Napoleon’s most momentous life: his final exile and death in St. Helena, and then his surprising afterlife as time and Napoleon’s own efforts made the man once seen as a tyrant and conquered appear more of a liberal man of the people.

Dwyer tells of Napoleon’s exile, death and popular resurrection in a book that seemed shorter than I expected. There’s not actually that much plot here, and the personages are mostly third-tier nonentities compared to the Wellingtons and Talleyrands, tears and kings, Josephines and Hortenses with whom Napoleon interacted during his heyday. But Dwyer is an engaging writer who keeps readers engaged with — or perhaps despite — a very tight focus. I might have appreciated a deeper discussion of Napoleon’s memoirs and how they rewrote the public story of Napoleon’s life, but we largely don’t get details.

Still, this is an essential final chapter to understand the life of the most consequential man of his age.… (meer)

The author states in his front matter that his intent is to write a biography emphasizing self-promotion as a major factor in Napoleon Bonaparte's rise to power. That sounds very much like the words of a man who is not in thrall to the Napoleonic Legend, and indeed the author takes a dim view of Bonaparte's abilities and personality. Yet bias is not the essential problem with this Brontosaurus. The problem, at bottom, is that his vehicle to examine said self-promotion is to obsess over some rather uninteresting paintings, newspapers, and plays in tedious detail; moreover, the reproductions of the paintings are so small and dark that the reader cannot follow along with the points he is making--admittedly the publisher's fault, not his own. Add on his fascination with abstruse tangents such as Corsica's politics in the revolutionary age, and the book soon becomes tiresome. The book contains very little military detail, which makes it a sketchy biography indeed, and one might suggest that if the author did simply want to explicate Bonapartist self-promotion, he should have written a shorter, more focused book on that specific subject, and ridden his hobbyhorse down that path.… (meer)