Napoleon Bonaparte was not a man made of marble.
He was hunger, ambition, calculation, and violence. A Corsican boy with a foreign name, cold school beds at his back, and a will that would one day shake Europe. From the mockery of military schools, he rose into the smoke of Toulon, through the bloody streets of Paris, across the battlefields of Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and finally into the mud of Waterloo.
**Napoleon Bonaparte: Rise Amid the Thunder of Cannons** tells the life of the French emperor as a harsh, dark historical novel: physical, dirty, direct, and stripped of any gilded heroic mask. Here, history smells of powder on unwashed skin, horse dung, wine, blood, vinegar, cannon smoke, and wet wool. The splendor of the coronation stands beside field hospitals, hunger, betrayal, and the price of a dream that became too large for one man to carry.
From the boy of Ajaccio to the general of the Revolution and the Emperor of the French, this novel follows Napoleon's path through love, power, war, and downfall. Josephine, Marie-Louise, the marshals, the Old Guard, the courts of Europe, and the men sinking into the mud of the battlefields all become part of a story in which genius and megalomania can no longer be cleanly separated.
This is not a dry history book.
This is Napoleon as a dark epic of flesh, fire, and iron.
A novel about a man who tried to reorder Europe-and was ultimately swallowed by the very world he had set ablaze.
