Books like Napoleon

Markham's biography stands as one of the more popular works in the Napoleonic oeuvre. It is comprehensive, well-researched and relatively accessible. He does fall prey to that habit of experts in a given field, assuming far too often that his reader is aware of the fundamentals. This is especially irksome when it comes to the battlefield, where he's fleet enough to hold interest but still manages to sail strategic troop movement and command philosophy like Frisbees over the head. In the afterward (penned by Steven Englund), the bulk of the praise goes to Markham's objectivity. It is rare to find such an even-handed study of Bonaparte coming from an Englishman. And since Englishmen write most of them? This sets the book apart.I'm going to go even further to say that much of the work on Napoleon appears to have been produced by avid, whiskered boys who care more about the wars and the weapons and the testosterone required to mount a campaign to rule the world than they do the finer points of this history. These are largely enthusiasts who can easily be imagined commandeering a mudroom to set up Waterloo-to-scale on an old table tennis platform. I'm certain nine out of ten of them would toss a limp wave in my direction, assuming with no evidence whatsoever that I'm talking about some romantic urge to hear more about Josephine. And I'm not. And stop being a Neanderthal. And Wellington's artillery goes over there.Under such circumstances, what I appreciate has a tendency to be drawn from my own extrapolation. Case in point:The island of Corsica was rife with revolution when Napoleon was born upon it. His father was operating as a guerrilla fighter and his mother was wandering the hills as a refugee during the final months of her pregnancy. Things settled down when the French won out and his parents, by all reports an attractive and dynamic couple, befriended the new governor, de Marbeuf. It was this connection that brought the family forward and granted Napoleon enrollment at Brienne, a school for the nobility in France - where he excelled in mathematics and took great joy in staging mock battles in the snow. So promising a student was he that he went straight from Brienne to the Ecole Militaire in Paris; an equivalent of Sandhurst and/or Annapolis. He flew through this school, skipping several intermediate grades, and was quickly given the rank of Lieutenant of Artillery at Valence (where his initial service was limited to suppressing food riots).Napoleon returned to Corsica during this time. His father had died, and he picked up the gauntlet to take a leading role in organizing a National Guard and obtaining a decree from Paris proclaiming that Corsicans, alongside the revolutionary French, were to be accorded full rights and liberties as its citizens. Unfortunately, political stability did not last. The island fell to civil war until one of its leaders (Paoli) ended in delivering it to the English. The Buonapartes, on the wrong side of this equation, were condemned to "perpetual execration and infamy." Their property was pillaged and the family fled into exile (at Marseilles) where they remained for several years subsisting primarily on Napoleon's army pay.From which I extrapolate (it must be said, in a manner I find amusing) the following:"Napoleon, the landlord is asking for the rent.""Napoleon, Mama wants a chicken.""Napoleon, Pauline very much needs a new dress.""Napoleon, Lucien would like a letter of recommendation.""But Joseph doesn't want to enlist in the army...""Napoleon, I know you're busy fighting in Italy, but can you tell us how to exchange for gold these silly assignats?"Now who, in their right mind, thinks these years as sole support of a family of tempestuous Corsicans did not inform his subsequent choices when parceling out crowns later on? These people became the placeholders of his Empire - and, frankly, I just don't think this exile in Marseilles gets anywhere near enough historical press.Markham gives Napoleon's youth a solid ten pages. And that's ten pages more than what one usually encounters, I have to hand him that.