THE LAST YEARS OF NAPOLEON (429 pp.) Ralph Korngold Harcourt, Brace ($6.75).
The island is a bleak South Atlantic rock ten miles long and seven miles wide. Eight months of the year it rains, three months the sun blazes down, one month it is bearable. Of 600 officers and men of H.M.S. Conqueror, stationed at the island in the early 19th century, more than 100 died in an 18-month period of hepatitis and amoebic dysentery. A rat-infested house on the atherapeutic isle served as prison for the man who had marched vast armies from Moscow to Madrid, and once...
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