From Nashville to Philadelphia

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk on Vienna 1814 in the Senate Chambers of the State Capitol in Nashville. We had a wonderful crowd - thanks to all the people who packed the room, I enjoyed meeting everyone! Ed McClanahan and I decided to ride down to the Southern Festival of Books together. If you do not know Ed's books, do yourself a favor and get one now. What was it Bob Edwards said of him? "Most people who have had as much fun as Ed are dead."

Ed kindly indulged my curiosity about his adventures on the west coast in the sixties, not least with his friend Ken Kesey, the iconic psychedelic bus Further, and life in general as a Merry Prankster. The conversation spilled over, after arrival at the capitol, into the afternoon and late into the evening over an excellent dinner with Ed and Mark at Mambu's. The chefs, Anita and Corey, are fabulous. I look forward to reading Ed's latest book, O the Clear Moment, which has just come out. Here's a review in Newsday.

After Nashville, I headed north to give a talk on Vienna 1814 at the Napoleonic Historical Society Conference at the Union League in Philadelphia. What a wonderful weekend that was! The conference was outstanding in every sense, except for one: On Saturday, during a concert featuring music of the Grand Armée, news arrived that the Napoleonic scholar Ben Weider had died. If you don't know him, Weider was the author of several books on Napoleon, including Assassination at St. Helena Revisited with Sten Forshufvud and most recently Wars Against Napoleon with General Michel Franceschi. Just a few weeks before his death, Weider had donated about one hundred Napoleonic paintings, statues, snuffboxes, and other antiques from his personal collection to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. This included, among other things, one of Napoleon's hats from the Russian campaign, one of shirts, and a couple locks of his hair.

Weider was president of the International Napoleonic Society and also served the International Federation of Bodybuilders (Mr. Olympia, Ms. International, etc.,.), which he co-established. So, in addition to having his books in my library, I have some of his weights in my gym. It was Ben and his brother Joe who brought an obscure Austrian bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger to the States in the late sixties and launched his career. J. David Markham gave a touching toast. The Napoleonic world has lost a champion. My condolences to his family and friends all over the world.

This weekend, I'll be doing a book signing for Finding Atlantis and Vienna 1814 at the Kentucky Book Fair. If you are in the area, stop by.

Napoleonic Buzz

This post inaugurates a new series highlighting recent books of interest for anyone, who, like me, devours accounts of Napoleon and the Napoleonic Age.

In Book Three of War and Peace, Pierre Bezuhov stumbles
onto the Raevsky Redoubt and witnesses the Battle of Borodino; Tolstoy paints an unforgettable portrait, but how accurate is it really? Read Alex Mikaberidze's first-rate The Battle of Borodino: Napoleon Against Kutuzov, (Pen and Sword's Campaign Chronicles) and find out. Mikaberidze's colleague at the Shreveport campus of Louisiana State University, Michael V. Leggiere, also has an outstanding new book, the first in a two-part study that examines Napoleon's brilliant campaign of the spring of 1814, and, at the same time, unravels the complicated series of events and forces that led to Napoleon's fall. Leggiere's The Fall of Napoleon: Volume 1, The Allied Invasion of France, 1813-1814 (Cambridge University Press) will be continued in The War in France, 1814. And don't miss the extraordinary excitement that followed shortly afterwards, when the victorious powers (and a horde of others) poured into Vienna to redraw the maps, divide the spoils, and celebrate, which will be told in Vienna 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna. Of course I'm not exactly unbiased, given my obsession with the dazzling, though little-understood Congress of Vienna, and well, you know.

In the not too distant future, too, I look forward to reading my friend Jeremy Popkin's forthcoming history of the revolution on the French half of the island of Santo Domingo (Haiti), which had important repercussions not only for France, but also the young republic of the United States. I'm also very excited about General Michel Franceschi and Ben Weider's Wars Against Napoleon: Debunking the Myth of the Napoleonic Wars, which was just published by Savas Beatie in December 2007. Read J. David Markham's excellent review here.