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The very name, Napoleon Bonaparte, still enthralls. Ever since this towering and terrible genius conquered Europe, he has been endlessly debated, compared, and made an icon. In Napoleon, the great dictator's energy and acumen are matched by those of his biographer, Paul Johnson. With masterly eloquence, Johnson charts Bonaparte's career from the barren island of Corsica and his early training in Paris - he was a bold soldier with an uncanny gift for math, maps, and strategy - through high-profile victories in Italy, military dictatorship, and campaigns across Europe, to his end on the forsaken isle of St. Helena. Johnson interprets Napoleon's life in the trajectory of his times, revealing how his complex and violent legacy seeded totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century and sounds an alert to us in the twenty-first.
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