"The very name Napoleon Bonparte 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 a man who is "the grandest possible refutation of those determinists who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than by the powerful wills of men and women."".

"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. 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."--BOOK JACKET.