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Napoleon Bonaparte and Civil War

Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte

Robert Asprey charts Napoleon Bonaparte's thrilling, reckless rise to power in this fast-paced first volume of the definitive biography of the fascinating, enigmatic, and still mysterious tragic conqueror.
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. Robert 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 Bonaparte 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.
Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte by Robert B. Asprey
ISBN: 0465048811

Civil War in Kyoto

How do ordinary people respond to prolonged terror? The convulsion of Japan's "Warring States" period between 1467 and 1568 destroyed the medieval order and exposed the framework of an early modern polity. Mary Elizabeth Berry investigates the experience of upheaval in Kyoto during this time. Using diaries and urban records (extensively quoted in the text), Mary Elizabeth Berry explores the violence of war, misrule, private justice, outlawry, and popular uprising.
Mary Elizabeth Berry also examines the structures of order, old and new, that abated chaos and abetted social transformation. The wartime culture of Kyoto comes to life in a panoramic study that covers the rebellion of the Lotus sectarians, the organization of work and power in commoner neighborhoods, the replotting of urban geography, and the redefinition of authority and prestige in the arena of play.
Mary Elizabeth Berry is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Berry is the author of Hideyoshi (1982).
Culture of Civil War in Kyoto by Mary Elizabeth Berry
ISBN: 0520208773

Henry Ossian Flipper

Henry Ossian Flipper was one of the nineteenth-century West's most remarkable individuals. The first African American graduate of West Point, Flipper served four years in the West as a cavalry officer but was court-martialed and dismissed from the service in 1882.
Henry Ossian Flipper spent the rest of his long life attempting to clear his name. Flipper's record of accomplishment was significant for any individual in any time, and for a nineteenth-century black American it was phenomenal.
As historian Quintard Taylor points out, in his post-Army career Henry Ossian Flipper was a surveyor, cartographer, civil and mining engineer, interpreter, translator, historian, inventor, newspaper editor, special agent for the Justice Department, deputy U.S. mineral surveyor, aide to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and consultant to the secretary of the interior.
His work carried him to Mexico, Venezuela, and Spain, and he left a record of achievement that demonstrates his enormous talent and unrelenting effort. The Colored Cadet or West Point contains Taylor's biographical essay, Flipper's account of his career at West Point, and a new index prepared for this volume.
The Colored Cadet at West Point: Autobiography of Lieut. Henry Ossian Flipper
ISBN: 0803268904

Saint-Exupery

Stacy Schiff has brought Saint-Exupery wonderfully to life in this definitive biography of the enchanting and complex man. Drawing on dramatic new material, Stacy Schiff provides full accounts of his many harrowing plunges to earth, the most serious of which led to the publication of Wind, Sand and Stars, and of his unhappy yet fertile years in New York, where he wrote both Flight to Arras and The Little Prince.
Stacy Schiff includes entirely fresh information on the career of Saint-Exupery as an Allied war pilot as well as a heartbreaking portrait of him as a Frenchman without a country - and without any politics - in 1940. Deftly, Stacy Schiff explores the tortured relationships of Saint-Exupery with his wife and with other women, drawing on many unpublished letters and on her extensive interviews with his friends and his lovers. And Stacy Schiff sets Saint-Exupery superbly in the context of an era increasingly at odds with his courtly personality and romantic vision.
Saint-Exupery: A Biography by Stacy Schiff
ISBN: 0679403108