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Originally Posted by issybird
Anyone? Bueller?
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As I've said, I've no basis on which to criticize his historiography. My gut reaction says that Napoleon and Ney couldn't have been quite so incompetent as Cornwell portrays them, nor Wellington so god-like; it was a near thing, after all. It's a matter of the defects of its virtues, I suppose. I like footnotes, but this was clearly mostly compiled from secondary sources and his own vast store of knowledge about the period. Geared to the general reader, so lacking any real historical rigor. I thought the best parts, as in the most evocative, were the quotations from first-person accounts and the pictures; the book was worth reading for those alone.
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I'm getting there, but it's a slow read for me. About a third of the way in now. I'm not much for the tense-shifting. I get why he thinks it might be useful, but it's not working so much for my brain.
I am enjoying the first-person accounts, but I am not a history reader in the slightest. This book is proving that to me.