Like his subject, Napoleon, author Jean-Paul Kauffmann has experienced captivity, as a three-year hostage in Beirut. He brings his insider's knowledge to this moving account of the most famous French soldier's last years in seclusion on a tropical island. After his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled and imprisoned by the British on the island of St. Helena. He became increasingly withdrawn, surviving on a diet of memories that he recounted to the few people around him. But the book -- part history, part travelogue -- portrays the leader as a prisoner also of his mind, poisoned by nostalgia for his triumphs and grief over his defeats. "A haunting, unforgettable book....Kauffmann captures the desolate atmosphere of Napoleon's last home with evocative precision." -- Boston Globe
“Rodenberg inventively uses Bonaparte’s own unfinished novel to tell the story of the despot’s rise to power, which she juxtaposes against the story of his last love affair. Told creatively and with excellent research!” —Stephanie Dray, New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of America's First Daughter and The Women of Chateau Lafayette “Beautiful and poignant.” —Allison Pataki, New York Times best-selling author of The Queen’s Fortune With its delightful adaptation of Napoleon Bonaparte’s real attempt to write romantic fiction, Finding Napoleon: A Novel offers a fresh take on Europe’s most powerful man after he’s lost everything—except his last love. A forgotten woman of history—the audacious Countess Albine—helps narrate their tale of intrigue, desire, and betrayal. After the defeated Emperor Napoleon goes into exile on tiny St. Helena Island in the remote South Atlantic, he and his lover, Albine de Montholon, plot to escape and rescue his young son. Banding together enslaved Africans, British sympathizers, a Jewish merchant, a Corsican rogue, and French followers, they confront British opposition—as well as treachery within their own ranks—with sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but always desperate action. Amid his passions and intrigues, Napoleon finishes his real novel Clisson that he started writing as a young man. Now it's a father's message to the young son whom his enemies took from him, but how can they get it to the boy? When Napoleon and Albine break faith with one another, ambition and Albine’s husband threaten their reconciliation. To succeed, Napoleon must learn whom to trust. To survive, Albine must decide whom to betray. This elegant, richly researched novel reveals the Napoleon history conceals and the Countess Albine history has forgotten.
After Waterloo, Napoleon gave himself up to the British, expecting to end his days leading the life of a country gentleman. Instead he was exiled to the remote island of St. Helena where he was to spend the last six years of his life in a house called Longwood. Jean-Paul Kauffmann, who was himself imprisoned as a hostage in Beirut for three years, visits Longwood and sits for days in the French Emperor's simple room in an attempt to understand those years of exile. The past seeps into the present and the house slowly comes alive with the great man's presence. Napoleon was accompanied to St. Helena by a faithful few whose eye-witness accounts reveal how he coped with his captivity and how it finally crushed him. The Dark Room at Longwood is Kauffmann's journey back into the past and a finely written, highly evocative exploration of Napoleon's final years.
The essential resource from Martha Stewart, with expert advice and lessons on gardening and making the most of your spectacular blooms Martha Stewart's lifelong love of flowers began at a young age, as she dug in and planted alongside her father in their family garden, growing healthy, beautiful blooms, every year. The indispensable lessons she learned then--and those she has since picked up from master gardeners--form the best practices she applies to her voluminous flower gardens today. For the first time, she compiles the wisdom of a lifetime spent gardening into a practical yet inspired book. Learn how and when to plant, nurture, and at the perfect time, cut from your garden. With lush blooms in hand, discover how to build stunning arrangements. Accompanied by beautiful photographs of displays in Martha's home, bursting with ideas, and covering every step from seed to vase, Martha's Flowers is a must-have handbook for flower gardeners and enthusiasts of all skill levels.
A gripping narrative history of Napoleon Bonaparte's ten-month exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated. Having overseen an empire spanning half the European continent and governed the lives of some eighty million people, he suddenly found himself exiled to Elba, less than a hundred square miles of territory. This would have been the end of him, if Europe's rulers had had their way. But soon enough Napoleon imposed his preternatural charisma and historic ambition on both his captors and the very island itself, plotting his return to France and to power. After ten months of exile, he escaped Elba with just of over a thousand supporters in tow, marched to Paris, and retook the Tuileries Palace--all without firing a shot. Not long after, tens of thousands of people would die fighting for and against him at Waterloo. Braude dramatizes this strange exile and improbable escape in granular detail and with novelistic relish, offering sharp new insights into a largely overlooked moment. He details a terrific cast of secondary characters, including Napoleon's tragically-noble official British minder on Elba, Neil Campbell, forever disgraced for having let "Boney" slip away; and his young second wife, Marie Louise who was twenty-two to Napoleon's forty-four, at the time of his abdication. What emerges is a surprising new perspective on one of history's most consequential figures, which both subverts and celebrates his legendary persona.
"Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent white families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay black man for mayor with 91 percent of the vote"--
“The most powerful spiritual healer, fixer, teacher on the planet.” —Oprah Winfrey Is it the job you hate but need in order to pay the rent? Is it that relationship that you gave your all to only to end up with a broken heart...again? Perhaps it's your children, a family member, or a life-long friend doing you in, dragging you down, pushing you to the brink. If you are an honorary member of the Black Woman's Suffering Society, you have probably been told that it's all your fault. Or that struggling and suffering is your lot in life. Iyanla Vanzant says, No! Life is an Act of Faith and suffering is optional! Those everyday challenges, obstacles, and dilemmas are what Iyanla calls "valleys." As bad as they may seem, there is a purpose or, as Iyanla says, "There is so much value in the valley." If you've ever been disappointed, betrayed, rejected, abandoned, or just plain old scared to let go, then you've been or may still be in a valley. Iyanla knows—she's been there and on a bad day she's still there, but now she shares the way out with you.
Napoleon, twenty years dead, rises like a phoenix over the politics of France and the destinies of three lovers. Against the historical backdrop of the French expedition in 1840 to retrieve Napoleon's body from Saint Helena, two men and a woman find themselves engulfed in long-dormant and dangerous political passions. Philippe de Rohan-Chabot, an aristocratic young diplomat, is charged with bringing the body from the island prison where Napoleon died to a glorious tomb at Les Invalides in Paris. Chabot's rival is the aging diplomat and author Henri Beyle, known to posterity as Stendhal. The enigmatic and impulsive Amelia Curial must free herself from the shadow of her mother's scandalous loves and untimely death, and from the life of stale convention that her family urges upon her. The dead emperor is a token in a political game to appease the enemies of the monarchy, but that gamble imperils the king's rule and a new revolution looms. Meanwhile, the interplay of the three central characters traces a delicate pattern of romance, longing, misunderstanding, and the obstacles to the pursuit of happiness.
The Emperor's Last Stand is a book about St Helena, an island with a sad, strange history, and about the tangle of stories and myths, absurdities and simple facts that have accumulated around Napoleon and his sojourn here. It follows him through the eyes of those who lived with him, who guarded him, who managed only to catch a brief glimpse of him, alive or dead. It is also a personal account: a description of Julia Blackburn's own journey to St Helena and at the same time a journey through the private memories and associations evoked by the telling of this poignant and curious story.
