Corporal to Coup d'Etat

ROAD To EMPIRE -- Fletcher Pratt --Doubleday, Doran $3.75).

Fletcher Pratt is a little man with a stub pipe stuck sideways under a wispy mustache. His mild eyes behind thick-lensed glasses, his bulging forehead, uncombed scalp lock and careless clothes sometimes make people take him for a clerk in a side-street seed store. Actually, he is the inventor of a naval war game which the Naval War College at Newport, R. I. rates more efficient than its own, and which Landlubber Pratt and enthusiasts play weekly on the floor of his big Manhattan studio. Between battles, Player Pratt steals time to author fat volumes whose swingtime style, alternating with simple, forceful exposition, make history's dull spots lively, its blind spots clear to many a layman. If, as some charge, he prefers the exciting but doubtful facts to the sound but dull, even grudging critics admit that in The Navy: A History and Hail, Caesar!, Fletcher Pratt has coaxed some engaging new curves into the muse of history.

In Road To Empire Historian Pratt, in his most coaxing mood, adds 346 more pages to the ten thousand books on Napoleon. This one retells the Corsican's career from corporal to coup d'etat. Since the story of Napoleon Bonaparte is to history what Ulysses and Faust are to myth, pettifogging historians have had hard work making it dull reading. Sometimes Author Pratt labors harder than he needs to keep it lively. But when he lets the legend tell itself, adding only his "worm's-eye view" (sidelights from old memoirs, letters, newssheets), he rivets readers' interest as easily as if he were pointing to a comet.

While descriptions of battles, complex campaigns, intrigues, finances are all top-drawer Pratt, clear and simple as the maps that dot the book, readers are apt later on to find such Prattlings as these tucked away in their mental bottom drawers:

> Napoleon in Italy, "whirling from city to city in the four-place coach," embarrassing his two secretaries seated opposite by taking "marital liberties with his wife."

> Mannish bluestocking Madame de Stael, trying to fascinate Napoleon (she had offered to be his mistress): "General, what woman do you like the best?" Napoleon: "The one I have."

> Josephine and her crony, Madame Tallien, dancing naked together before Director Barras while Napoleon was in Italy. Each had been Barras' mistress.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.