The James Logan Courier

Each week, The Courier spotlights books newly arrived, or expected to arrive, in the James Logan Media Center.

Napoleon by Paul Johnson
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult (May 9, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670030783
ISBN-13: 978-0670030781

From us.penguingroup.com:
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, whose histories have been lauded as "fresh, readable, provocative . . . wise" (Los Angeles Times). Here Johnson profiles "the grandest possible refutation of those who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than the powerful wills of men and women."

With masterly eloquence, Napoleon 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. In Napoleon's insatiable hunger for power, Johnson sees a realist unfettered by patriotism or ideology, a brilliant opportunist and propagandist who fulfilled his ambition in the aftermath of the French Revolution. He 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.
Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult; 1st American edition (October 2, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670894435
ISBN-13: 978-0670894437

From us.penguingroup.com:
Virginia Woolf's life as part of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group has captured the imagination of millions. Now Nigel Nicolson, the distinguished son of British writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West--one of Woolf's closest friends and sometime lover-- threads his personal reminiscences through the narrative of her life. In so doing, he paints an astonishing portait of one of the most remarkable women in history. Nicolson recalls childhood times with Woolf: from her walks around his ancestral home as she planned Orlando to her writing of the modern classics Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own. Virginia Woolf probes keenly her stance on women's issues and the nature of war and is suffused with personal admiration and affection for this incomparable writer.