Writing for the New York Sun, John Merriman reviewed Philip Dwyer’s Napoleon: The Path to Power, finding it “an excellent history and a very good read.” He says that many sections were not only “compelling,” but also finds them pertinent to current militaristic and political events. Read the entire review here.

A groundbreaking biography focusing on the young Napoleon and his improbable rise to power. Debunking many of the myths that Napoleon himself promulgated as an early manipulator of the media, Dwyer’s book sheds new light on Napoleon’s inner life and character, and on the twisting path that led from his boyhood in Corsica to the coup that gave him leadership of France at the age of thirty.

Elsewhere in the NY Sun, Eric Ormsby reviewed The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, in which “the well-known historian of books and reading lovingly explores the nooks and crannies of this enchanted domain.” Ormsby later states that “there seems to be nothing Mr. Manguel has not read,” although he is “never narrowly bookish.” Read the entire review here.

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.