This is the book version of the graduate level seminar we all took with Professor Kaiser on the "Great Conquerors of Europe," which focused upon Louis XIV, Napoleon and Hitler. The course itself was not well organized, and Prof. Kaiser, who we quickly nicknamed "Kaiser David," did not have a coherent theory or thesis to unite the course, other than perhaps the notion that it was impossible to unite continental Europe by force with any permanency or stability without arousing a coutervailing coalition. This book is the fleshed out version of the course, and one wishes it finally explained all of the omissions of the course, but quite to the opposite, it fails to explain even the things that Prof. Kaiser explained in the class setting. There are strange lacunae and omissions in this book that a good editing or re-writing might repair, and one would have expected a much better work from such a well-educated, refined and polished scholar. One serious problem here is that the terrain covered, much like Napoleon's trek to Russia and back, is far too great for Prof. Kaiser's book to bear, and like the tattered remains of the Grand Imperial Army that managed to straggle back from Moscow, by the time one finishes this book, one feels as if the Russian Winter has come and gone, and left one chilled to the bone, with nothing sustaining one in the meantime.
No comments:
Post a Comment