Book Review: The Corsican Shadow by Dirk Cussler

Clive Cussler The Corsican Shadow by Dirk Cussler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To protect the spirit of France from the Germans in the summer of 1940, a secret mission is launched to save the nation’s greatest citizen from the hands of its eternal enemy with a nice shiny bonus. The Corsican Shadow is the twenty-seventh installment of the Dirk Pitt series and the second that Dirk Cussler has written exclusively to continue this father’s creation.

Dirk Cussler wrote a tight, engaging narrative in which the protagonists, though separated from one another, interacted with two factions of the same antagonists. Though Cussler tried to hide the fact that the body of Napoleon was the big treasure with diamonds, the book’s title—though a character was included as a misdirection—and the size of the crate basically gave things away. Another nitpick was that fact that the antagonists didn’t kill any of the protagonists instead of just tying them up to be blown up and having one of the antagonists thinking this same thing before deciding to blow Summer Pitt up, while addressing the issue it just highlighted it even more. Yet, this was a page-turner of a novel that overall had very good writing and followed one of the series’ good adventures.

The Corsican Shadow is another good installment written by Dirk Cussler to continue the Dirk Pitt series begun by his father.

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Book Review: The Age of Napoleon by Will & Ariel Durant

The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After spending over 40 years writing a prelude to your major work on Napoleon Bonaparte, you finish what you believe that last book you’ll be able to complete before you die but when the reaper doesn’t show up what do you do? The Age of Napoleon is the concluding volume of The Story of Civilization series written by Will & Ariel Durant not only detailing the life and career of the titular historical personage along with his place and roll in the history of the times but also the cultural history of Europe during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Unlike any of the previous volumes of the series that featured a person in the title—Louis XIV, Voltaire, or Rousseau—the life and actions of Napoleon Bonaparte felt like it was central to all the historical, cultural, and other events during the quarter century is covered. To be clear this was not a biography of Napoleon, as for nearly a third of the book he is only a shadow looming over other areas of Europe or just out of vision as a threat or inspiration depending on the individual. Yet as Napoleon dominates politically and militarily, the Durants sweep of cultural history features the dominance of Beethoven in music, the beginning dominance of German philosophers but mainly focusing on Hegel, and the variety of English poetry from Wordsworth and Coleridge with Southey on one end of the spectrum to Bryon and Shelley on the other. The 80 odd pages of the volume goes over Napoleon’s fall, but even though the reader knows how it ends the Durants write so engagingly that one keeps on turning the page. As a historical synopsis of a hectic quarter century that set the stage for the modern world, this book is a worthy concluding volume to an over 3000-year long biography of Western—i.e. European—civilization.

The Age of Napoleon features as the Durants’ put it a “once in a millennium” individual that showcases the “power and limits of the human mind”, it is up to the reader to determine if a great man shapes history or if events produce a great man.

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