Napoleon the Great
Andrew Roberts
Allen Lane (hardcover), 2014
PRs 3495
Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just 20 years, from October 1795, when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe.
After seizing power in a coup d’état, he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles, he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful Empire style in the arts.
The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died, and his empire began to unravel.
More than any other modern biographer, Andrew Roberts conveys Napoleon’s tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality even to his enemies. He has walked 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields and has absorbed the gigantic new French edition of Napoleon’s letters, which allows a complete re-evaluation of this exceptional man.
He overturns many received opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Josephine: She took a lover immediately after their marriage, and, as Roberts shows, he had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged.
Of the climactic Battle of Leipzig in 1813, as the fighting closed around them, a French sergeant major wrote, “No-one who has not experienced it can have any idea of the enthusiasm that burst forth among the half-starved, exhausted soldiers when the Emperor was there in person. If all were demoralised and he appeared, his presence was like an electric shock. All shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and everyone charged blindly into the fire.”
Inside Central Asia
Dilip Hiro
Harper Collins (hardcover), 2011
PRs 1198
Review
“For those who still get their “-stans” mixed up, Hiro’s book provides a detailed and nuanced overview of the region of central Asia. He explains the ethnic tensions, religious intolerance and struggle for political identity in the lands caught between two behemoths the splintered Soviet empire and the rising Chinese one.”
-Financial Times, Best Books of 2009
“Readers acquainted with Mr Hiro’s prolific writing about Asia and the Islamic world will be unsurprised to learn that Inside Central Asia is a conscientious guide to the region, full of dependable history-telling and analysis.”
-The Economist
“Hiro’s account provides a fast-moving and well-sourced genealogy of the Central Asian republics’ political and economic trajectories, focusing on the post-Stalinist period up to the present day. It is unlikely that more comprehensive analysis of this period in Central Asia has been written, and it serves as a valuable update to Hiro’s earlier Between Marx and Muhammad: the Changing Face of Central Asia.”
-Issac Scarborough
About the Author
Dilip Hiro is an author, playwright, and journalist who has written 14 books about the Middle East and contributed to several others.
Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslims Intellectuals and the Study of Islam
Carool Kersten
Hurst (paperback), 2011
PRs 4400
Dramatic political events involving Muslims across the world have put Islam under increased scrutiny. However, the focus of this attention is generally limited to the political realm and often even further confined by constrictive views of Islamism narrowed down to its most extremist exponents. Much less attention is paid to the parallel development of more liberal alternative Islamic discourses. The final decades of the twentieth-century has also seen the emergence of a Muslim intelligentsia exploring new and creative ways of engaging with the Islamic heritage. Drawing on advances made in the Western human sciences and understanding Islam in comprehensive terms as a civilisation rather than restricting it to religion in a conventional sense their ideas often cause controversy, even inviting accusations of heresy. Cosmopolitans and Heretics examines three of these new Muslim intellectuals who combine a solid grounding in the Islamic tradition with an equally intimate familiarity with the latest achievements of Western scholarship in religion. This cosmopolitan attitude challenges existing stereotypes and makes these thinkers difficult to categorise. Underscoring the global dimensions of new Muslim intellectualism, Kersten analyses contributions to contemporary Islamic thought of the late Nurcholish Madjid, Indonesia’s most prominent public intellectual of recent decades, Hasan Hanafi, one of the leading philosophers in Egypt, and the influential French-Algerian historian of Islam Mohammed Arkoun. Emphasising their importance for the rethinking of the study of Islam as a field of academic inquiry, this is the first book of its kind and a welcome addition to the intellectual history of the modern Muslim world.
Vying for Allah’s Vote: Understanding Islamic Parties,
Political Violence, and Extremism in Pakistan
Haroon K. Ullah
Foundation Books (hardcover), 2014
PRs 1095
This books studies how religion, politics, and policy are inextricably linked in Pakistan. In this book, Haroon K Ullah analyses the origins, ideologies, bases of support, and electoral successes of the largest and most influential Islamic parties in Pakistan. Based on his extensive fieldwork in Pakistan, he develops a new typology for understanding and comparing the discourses put forth by these parties in order to assess what drives them and what separates the moderate from the extreme. A better understanding of the range of parties is critical for knowing how the US and other western nations can engage states where Islamic political parties hold both political and moral authority.
Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women
Khaled Abou El Fadl
Viva (paperback), 2006
PRs 790
This challenging book reviews the ethical foundations of the Islamic legal system, suggesting that an authoritarian reading of scripture has often had grave consequences for parts of Muslim society.
Drawing upon both religious and secular sources, Islamic legal expert Khaled Abou El Fadl argues that divinely ordained law is frequently misinterpreted by Muslim authorities at the expense of certain groups, especially women. Citing a series of injustices in Islamic society, from the ban on women driving to the restrictions governing female clothing, Abou El Fadl’s thoughtful and cogent study proposes instead a return to the original ethics at the heart of the Muslim legal system.
Combining the vast latest scholarship with an accessible writing style and a useful glossary, this provocative and passionate book is required reading for all those interested in the contemporary landscape of Islam, law and women’s rights.