Here are 100 books that The Campaigns of Napoleon fans have personally recommended if you like
The Campaigns of Napoleon.
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A philosophy professor, my central interest has always been something historical: what is going on in this strange modern world we live in? Addressing this required forty years of background work in the natural sciences, history, social sciences, and the variety of contemporary philosophical theories that try to put them all together. In the process, I taught philosophy courses on philosophical topics, social theory, and the sciences, wrote books, and produced video courses, mostly focused on that central interest. The books listed are some of my favorites to read and to teach. They are crucial steps on the journey to understand who we are in this unprecedented modern world.
Best recent book examining human morality from a scientific, psychological point of view.
Darwinians used to think humans had to be selfish and immoral. Contemporary evolution argues the opposite, that humans evolved moral limits on our selfishness in order to live together. Haidt’s is the best book presenting this new evolutionary psychology.
But it goes further to connect those scientific issues with contemporary politics, explaining why people from “red” and “blue” states cannot understand each other: they each embody a short list of human moral values, but different ones. This is a great book for thinking carefully about human morality and contemporary politics. Students love it, and so do I.
'A landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself' The New York Times
Why can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as 'fairness' and 'freedom' mean such different things to different people? Why is it so hard to see things from another viewpoint? Why do we come to blows over politics and religion?
Jonathan Haidt reveals that we often find it hard to get along because our minds are hardwired to be moralistic, judgemental and self-righteous. He explores how morality evolved to enable us to form communities, and…
I have been a lover of history all my life, seeing its course change in decisive conflicts, the clash of empires that defined the winners and losers. One thing that always fascinated me was seemingly insignificant events that ended up assuring either victory or defeat. I have always said that “the devil, and the story, is in the details.” The books on this list provide those details exhaustively. These histories are the grist for the mill of my writing mind, and I think my readers can clearly see that my books are “labors of love” in homage to the history I have studied so diligently throughout my life.
Ian Knight is another mind in love with the gritty and colorful era of British colonialism. His book is surely the best and most comprehensive account of Lord Chelmsford’s ill-fated sortie into Zululand that led to one of Britain’s greatest military defeats.
In this age of the red coats with their white belts and Pith Helmets, and the famed Martini & Henry Rifle, Knight tells the story of the opening moves of the Zulu war from the perspectives of all the major officers and leaders on both sides.
This is one of those books that ends up heavily underlined in red as the campaign unfolds to embrace the great defeat at Isandlwana and the small compensating victory at Roarke’s Drift. I relied heavily on this book to rivet in the factual data while writing my own alternate history of this campaign, Zulu Hour.
The battle of iSandlwana was the single most destructive incident in the 150-year history of the British colonisation of South Africa. In one bloody day over 800 British troops, 500 of their allies and at least 2000 Zulus were killed in a staggering defeat for the British empire. The consequences of the battle echoed brutally across the following decades as Britain took ruthless revenge on the Zulu people.
In Zulu Rising Ian Knight shows that the brutality of the battle was the result of an inevitable clash between two aggressive warrior traditions. For the first time he gives full weight…
I started reading classical books at a very young age. Granted, I did not understand a lot of things then. Rereading the same books again after years made me realize that more than what the author was trying to convey, my maturity made a world of difference when reading a book. It was the same text but with entirely different contexts and perspectives. I love old books. Books that take me back a century or more. It gives me an insight into how people lived, thought, and felt back then. It helps me connect with people across centuries.
Do I need a reason to love this book? There are too many characters, too many subplots, too many deaths, and the ruins of beloved characters. And yet, the entire picture it presents is beautiful. That is how life is– unpredictable and chaotic.
I learned a lot about war, the mentality of people who go to fight, and the mentality of the people left behind. Above all, it was such a good feeling to finish the big book–probably one of the biggest books I had read and loved!
From the award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov comes this magnificent new translation of Tolstoy's masterwork.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
War and Peacebroadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both…
I have been a lover of history all my life, seeing its course change in decisive conflicts, the clash of empires that defined the winners and losers. One thing that always fascinated me was seemingly insignificant events that ended up assuring either victory or defeat. I have always said that “the devil, and the story, is in the details.” The books on this list provide those details exhaustively. These histories are the grist for the mill of my writing mind, and I think my readers can clearly see that my books are “labors of love” in homage to the history I have studied so diligently throughout my life.
If the Age of the Dreadnoughts fires your imagination, this book certainly fired mine. It is the most authoritative book written on the Battle of Jutland and the British Naval Command in WWI.
Beyond a mere recounting of who commanded and what ships were involved, this book takes a deep dive into the naval strategy of the time, how and why ships were built, and how they were sailed and fought, down to tactical details that end up determining decisive battle outcomes that changed the naval history of WWI.
Learn everything from orders of battle, ship handling, and turn by decisive turn in the swirling battle that defined an era at sea—Jutland. Gordon let me shovel in the historical coal to support my books, one that also touched on an alternate outcome of the battle of Jutland.
Foreword by Admiral Sir John Woodward. When published in hardcover in 1997, this book was praised for providing an engrossing education not only in naval strategy and tactics but in Victorian social attitudes and the influence of character on history. In juxtaposing an operational with a cultural theme, the author comes closer than any historian yet to explaining what was behind the often described operations of this famous 1916 battle at Jutland. Although the British fleet was victorious over the Germans, the cost in ships and men was high, and debates have raged within British naval circles ever since about…
Napoleon has fascinated William Nester since he was a boy. During a dozen years living in Europe, he visited most of Napoleon’s palaces and battlefields. For this biography, he carefully read all of Napoleon’s memoirs and 40,108 letters. His book captures Napoleon’s complexity, paradoxes, contradictions, accomplishments, catastrophes, and genius. William Nester, a Professor at the Department of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, is the author of more than forty books. His book George Rogers Clark: I Glory in War won the Army Historical Foundation's best biography award, and Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon, won the 2016 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award.
John Elting’s Swords Around a Throne is the
best exploration of Napoleon’s army including organization, logistics,
strategy, tactics, uniforms, training, weapons, equipment, discipline, and
recreation, written with insight, sympathy, and humor. The book reveals the
continuities and changes from the Revolution to Waterloo. Elting enlivens this
work with numerous vivid excerpts from journals and letters by those who
actually made the history, from generals to privates.
This authoritative, comprehensive, and enthralling book describes and analyzes Napoleon's most powerful weapon,the Grande Armee which at its peak numbered over a million soldiers. Elting examines every facet of this incredibly complex human machine: its organization, command system, logistics, weapons, tactics, discipline, recreation, mobile hospitals, camp followers, and more. From the army's formation out of the turmoil of Revolutionary France through its swift conquests of vast territories across Europe to its legendary death at Waterloo, this book uses excerpts from soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts, and numerous firsthand details to place the reader in the boots of Napoleon's conscripts and generals.…
Napoleon has fascinated William Nester since he was a boy. During a dozen years living in Europe, he visited most of Napoleon’s palaces and battlefields. For this biography, he carefully read all of Napoleon’s memoirs and 40,108 letters. His book captures Napoleon’s complexity, paradoxes, contradictions, accomplishments, catastrophes, and genius. William Nester, a Professor at the Department of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, is the author of more than forty books. His book George Rogers Clark: I Glory in War won the Army Historical Foundation's best biography award, and Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon, won the 2016 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award.
The Anatomy of Glory tells the epic story of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard with keen prose that reads like a novel. It raises the key question of whether by creating an elite force of his best soldiers, he weakened his line infantry regiments, cavalry squadrons, and artillery batteries that he drew them from. He refused to commit his Old Guard at Borodino; had he done so he likely would have transformed a marginal victory into a decisive victory. He did send in his Old Guard at Waterloo only to see British regular regiments rout them.
With a New Introduction By Col. John R. Elting (USA, ret.) The glory of the Imperial Guard resounds above all others in the annals of war. Created, built and nurtured as a bodyguard for Napoleon, it grew from a brigade of fewer than two thousand men into a virtual army, and became 'a human fortress which no one but [Napoleon] could dominate and no enemy could penetrate'. And, on such battlefields as Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Wagram and Waterloo, it won the laurels of undying fame. Written by France's foremost historian of the Napoleonic Wars, Commandant Henry Lachouque, and translated and…
Napoleon has fascinated William Nester since he was a boy. During a dozen years living in Europe, he visited most of Napoleon’s palaces and battlefields. For this biography, he carefully read all of Napoleon’s memoirs and 40,108 letters. His book captures Napoleon’s complexity, paradoxes, contradictions, accomplishments, catastrophes, and genius. William Nester, a Professor at the Department of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, is the author of more than forty books. His book George Rogers Clark: I Glory in War won the Army Historical Foundation's best biography award, and Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon, won the 2016 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award.
Philip Haythornthwaite’s Napoleonic Source Bookis a comprehensive overview of the army and navy commanders, campaigns, regiments, uniforms, and weapons of not just the great powers, but every state that fought in the Napoleonic Era. The 200 or so illustrations and maps, and the 700 entry glossary are first-rate.
This illustrated guide provides, in an accessible, narrative format, information on the Napoleonic period. Over 100 anecdotes of the era, contemporary illustrations and mapwork are presented.
I’ve been fascinated by war since I was literally a toddler. True story, I was the only two-and-a-half-year-old in South Boston, Massachusetts with an adult library card. I had to get one, and to get it to prove to the librarian that I could read, in order to check out certain books that I wanted. I only recall one title, The Battle of Midway. Since then, though I’ve done other things like practice law and become a novelist, most of my adult life was still spent as an enlisted man, non-commissioned officer, and company grade and field grade infantry officer in the Army.
Written around twenty-five centuries ago, this remains the seminal work of history, political science, man as he is, war, and diplomacy. The author expressly intended that it be “a work for all time,” and so it remains. Moreover, it serves still as an example of a civilization ruining itself, as Europe did in the Great War. Thus, it continues to warn.
Such was Macaulay's verdict on Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) and his history of the Peloponnesian War, the momentous struggle between Athens and Sparta as rival powers and political systems that lasted for twenty-seven years from 431 to 404 BC, involved virtually the whole of the Greek world, and ended in the fall of Athens. Thucydides himself was a participant in the war; to his history he brings an awesome intellect, brilliant narrative, and penetrating analysis of the nature of power, as it affects both states and individuals.
I’ve been fascinated by war since I was literally a toddler. True story, I was the only two-and-a-half-year-old in South Boston, Massachusetts with an adult library card. I had to get one, and to get it to prove to the librarian that I could read, in order to check out certain books that I wanted. I only recall one title, The Battle of Midway. Since then, though I’ve done other things like practice law and become a novelist, most of my adult life was still spent as an enlisted man, non-commissioned officer, and company grade and field grade infantry officer in the Army.
Everyone’s surely heard the old saw, “Amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics.” It’s not exactly true; real professionals study everything, down to and including the plastic arts, because war is the art that subsumes all other arts and sciences. That said, while studying everything, the real professional still gives pride of place to logistics. Van Creveld explains in this brief volume how that has historically worked or failed, and why.
Why did Napoleon succeed in 1805 but fail in 1812? Could the European half of World War II have been ended in 1944? These are only two of the many questions that form the subject-matter of this meticulously researched, lively book. Drawing on a very wide range of sources, van Creveld examines the specifics of war: namely, those formidable problems of movement and supply, transportation and administration, so often mentioned - but rarely explored - by the vast majority of books on military history. In doing so he casts his net far and wide, from Gustavus Adolphus to Rommel, from…
I’ve been fascinated by war since I was literally a toddler. True story, I was the only two-and-a-half-year-old in South Boston, Massachusetts with an adult library card. I had to get one, and to get it to prove to the librarian that I could read, in order to check out certain books that I wanted. I only recall one title, The Battle of Midway. Since then, though I’ve done other things like practice law and become a novelist, most of my adult life was still spent as an enlisted man, non-commissioned officer, and company grade and field grade infantry officer in the Army.
Yes, I know: “Eight volumes? Are you mad, Kratman?”
This is unquestionably the greatest single history on the American Civil War ever written. There are over sixty thousand books about the Civil War in existence. You cannot hope to read them all. This being true, if the subject interests you—and it ought, because the Civil War made the United States what it is—if you can read only eight, make this series the eight. Think of it as a really long single volume work.
