Evangeline Bruce must be congratulated for this excellent dual biography of Napoleon and Josephine. This is the most useful kind of biography, in that we not only learn the idiosyncratic details of individual lives, but the protagonists serve as windows through which we observe an age.

I have assigned this book to my students in a 300-level seminar on "The Age of Napoleon," and it has generated innumerable classroom discussions on valuable topics: the role of women in revolutionary and imperial France, the sources of political power, the nature of Thermidorian society, and many other things. Despite the length of the book, the students ate it up.

Bruce makes an occasional small error. She describes Joseph and Lucien Bonaparte as "uxorious," despite the fact that both men (indeed, all the Bonaparte men) had several lovers. She describes Andre Massena as "over six feet tall," although he was actually only about an inch taller than Napoleon. She describes General (later Marshal) Augereau as "illiterate," which was true of him before he became a general, but he had learned to read and write before the period she describes.

But despite these things, her grasp of the "big picture" is so good that this book will become one of my standard texts on this period for years to come.

After more than half a century, I remembered still the sonorous rhythms of the prelude to Evangeline. Much has changed since I first read the tale of Arcadian innocence torn apart on order of the heartless King, and Longfellow and his poetry have fallen on hard times and harder hearts in the interim

His allusions and images are strained; his words pathetically romantic and sentimental; and the story of Evangeline barely tracks the actual events of 1755. All of the charges are true, yet much of value remains in the poem. The poet recognized instantly a crime against humanity when he first heard the tale, and he had the talent, drive, and fortitude to create this vehicle to memorialize the sad story of star crossed lovers, families, and communities divided and exiled from their adored homeland.

That a heart could be committed to a lifetime of wandering in search of a lost love seems archaic to the sophisticates of the twenty-first century, but I believe it possible, even today.

I read the poem - aloud and silently - and the beat of the accents, like operatic arias, added to the the sorrow of the sentimental story. I recommend this poem to parents who love to read aloud to their children. I'm sure that Evangeline and her beloved Gabriel have the power still to stir the hearts of the young - and of the readers, too.

A very useful notes section offsets an overly wordy foreword. I found it easy to find and reference words and phrases no longer in common use.

Read it aloud to your early adolescent sons and daughters and to your love. You'll be happy you did.

I heard about this book from my mom a few weeks ago after I went to see the movie Serendipity. I told her about the plot of the two people in love searching for one another and just missing every time. She said it reminded her of another story, Evangeline. Since i attend an engineering school I am always very eager to read books with real meaning behind them, given that all my textbooks focus on is wastewater treatment, biological processes, etc... So given that I wasn't really expecting too much but a relief from textbooks when I picked up this book. Little did I know it was soon to become one of my favorites. I was pleasantly surprised by the Christian influences behind the poem and found myself crying a lot more than I expected. I highly recommend this to anyone who has a great appreciation for well written, romantic poetry and literature.

I am not going to sit here and claim to be the expert on English language poetic literature my 12th grade English teacher would like me to be. I have often fallen prey to the boredom of reading long poems and look upon poetry generally with some weariness.

When my father went to New Orleans, I asked him to bring me something back. He brought back a copy of this poem. It was required reading for my parents growing up - I had never heard of it.

I confess I was probably hesitant when I sat down to read it. But in no time I was hooked. The poetic language is perfectly styled to slowly tell the tale of two Acadian lovers doomed by the path of Acadian history to separate lives. Reading this poem is like suckling slowly on a sweet nectar under the gently rustling leaves of an oak on the side of a gently flowing river. If this sounds appealing to you, then you will enjoy this poem.