Accompanying the French army that invaded Egypt in 1798 were 150 savants whose most famous discovery was the Rosetta stone. Burleigh's alluring account of these enlightened imperialists groups their individual biographies into their audacious endeavor to collect, categorize, and systematize every bit of information they encountered about Islamic culture and the vestiges of pharaonic Egypt. Producing one of the great works of nineteenth-century natural science, La Description de l'Égypte, the group endured such hardships that readers will scarcely believe they could have survived, let alone maintained the intellectual stamina to create the discipline of Egyptology. Plague and war hampered their activity, and death eventually carried off dozens of their number in the years they were stranded by Nelson's destruction of Napoleon's fleet in Egypt. These privations stand out in Burleigh's narrative, bestowing on the savants a scientific heroism that Burleigh wraps in ambiguities with the attempted conquest of which they were an integral part. Better than a good story well told, Burleigh's is a perceptive appraisal of this fateful interaction of Western science with Middle Eastern culture.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2007 Booklist

A breathless account of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. Napoleon was attempting to get a head start in Europe's frantic imperial scramble to carve up the rest of the world, writes Burleigh (The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian, 2003, etc.). But he tried to lend France's military bid a certain moral authority by bringing with him scientists and artists to help administer the new empire. They were there not just to conquer, but to civilize. Napoleon's scholars unearthed hugely important antiquities, most famously the Rosetta Stone. Engineers created maps and explored Egyptian waterways. Doctors tried to keep French soldiers healthy and wrote condescending reports about Egyptian "folk medicine." Magazine writer Burleigh intriguingly comments on the cultural impact that the "discovery" of Egypt had on French decorative arts and fashion, for example the creation in 1804 of a porcelain dinner service decorated with pyramids and Sphinxes. She doffs her hat at "Orientalism," but her discussion of the colonial fantasies that animated it is shallow and her analysis overly simplistic. "When the French arrived, various European-style vendors [of tobacco and wine] suddenly appeared," she writes, not bothering to consider the history of economic negotiation and cultural exchange that might well account for such speedy commercial enterprise. She drops intriguing hints about French attitudes toward "disposable" Egyptian women--after an outbreak of plague, for example, officials in Cairo ordered the drowning of all prostitutes "found having relations with a Frenchman" as a means of protecting the Europeans--but here too fails to fully explore the stories her sources prompt her to tell. Timely, but disappointingly superficial. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

NAPOLEON'S occupation of Egypt in 1798 was among history's more memorable military fiascos. A side skirmish in his drawn-out colonial competition with the British, by any measure the invasion went badly. The British promptly sank much of the French fleet, stranding the forces. A march across the desert from Alexandria to Cairo without so much as canteens, as Nina Burleigh tells us in "Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt," left "untold hundreds" dead. A Muslim uprising at Cairo resulted in more deaths and, not insignificantly, the loss of any remnant of civility on the part of the French who, invading the Azhar mosque in an effort to crush an insurgency, desecrated the Koran and, as an Egyptian contemporary wrote, "soiled the mosque, blowing their spit in it ... and defecating in it." And then there was the plague, which, together with dysentery and other diseases, may have killed as many as 10,000 of the French soldiers. Napoleon himself beat a retreat back to France after just a year, but his troops remained as uneasy and unwilling occupiers. Some historians see this venture as an exploratory expedition gone wrong. Others, including the historian Juan Cole in his recent book "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East," call it a brutal invasion. In an article in The Nation in August, Cole drew a parallel with our current situation in Iraq. In "Mirage," Burleigh's description of a young army overdressed for the sweltering heat (in Alpine wool uniforms), afraid and unable to communicate with the increasingly hostile locals, also has echoes of the present. Her principal subject, however, is not the military but the 151 "savants" Napoleon took along - geologists, mapmakers, naturalists, artists, even a musicologist. Most signed on enthusiastically, though they (like a majority of the troops) had no idea where they were going until shortly before they arrived in Alexandria. Burleigh focuses on 10 of the most prominent, organizing her chapters around an inventor, a mathematician, the engineers and so on. The artist Dominique-Vivant Denon, a "lace-cuffed" aesthete, as Burleigh tells us more than once, traveled widely throughout the country, making sketches on the fly, sometimes calmly drawing at his easel as bullets flew around him. The book he produced on his return became the first best seller of the 19th century, and he became the first director of the Louvre. The "revolutionary fanatic" Gaspard Monge, a geometer, was one of Napoleon's closest companions ("Monge loved me as one loves a mistress," Napoleon once said). Most significant, perhaps, were the contributions of the inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who had developed the prototype for the modern pencil; short on supplies, the scientists "relied on salvage, severe economies and Nicolas Conté." Burleigh, a journalist and the author of "A Very Private Woman," a well-received account of the 1964 murder of the prominent Washington figure Mary Meyer, hurtles in less than 250 pages through the three grueling years the savants spent in Egypt, peppering her tale with multitudes of facts, digressions and anecdotes, recounted in a slightly encyclopidic tone. One longs to dwell a bit longer on a character like Savigny, who went to Egypt as a botanist but became obsessed instead with the country's insect life. His catalog of Egyptian beetles and butterflies, which in some ways anticipated Darwin, was completed long after his return, by which time a mysterious eye ailment (probably picked up during the expedition) had left him so intolerant of light that he sometimes wore a steel mask and covered his head in black netting. The most famous artifact the scholars discovered was the Rosetta stone, which soon wound up in British possession. The French military leadership, ever impatient with the scientists left in their care, bargained it away, along with all the scientists' notes, drawings and specimens, in the truce that finally allowed them to return home. To this day it sits in the British Museum despite Egypt's request for its return, with a label that says only "Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801, presented by King George III." Perhaps it was historic justice that a Frenchman eventually cracked the code (working from copies), in 1822. IN the end, the notes and specimens were retrieved by the zoologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a hero in France ever since, who argued that only the savants could decipher their own jottings, and threatened to destroy them rather than give them up. The British conceded, and crates of material were shipped to France. Over the next 26 years, the scientific veterans compiled the magnificent "Description de l'Égypte," an oversize 24-volume encyclopedia published serially for wealthy subscribers, encompassing not only the natural history of Egypt but a history of its people, descriptions of the Pyramids and other monuments, and details of daily life, commerce and agriculture. The book's legacy - and the legacy of Napoleon's Egyptian adventure - was enormous, prompting the half-century of Egyptomania that swept Europe. The resulting decades of plunder brought Cleopatra's Needle to New York, the Luxor obelisk to the Place de la Concorde, and room after room of mummies to the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum and the Louvre. Two hundred years later, a new struggle over national cultural heritage may in the end restore at least some of this magnificence to its country of origin.

When 28-year-old Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, his band of 50,000 soldiers and sailors was accompanied by 151 Parisian scientists and artists, who laid the groundwork for what became Egyptology. Ten of these remarkable men are the focus of Burleigh's narrative. Among them, three of the most prominent were the lowborn, "pugnacious" mathematician Gaspard Monge, a dedicated revolutionary who invented descriptive geometry; the painfully shy chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, who invented new ways to make gunpowder and steel; and the witty artist and diplomat Dominique-Vivant Denon, who produced 200 architecturally precise sketches of Egyptian ruins and a bestselling travelogue; later he became Napoleon's first director of the Louvre Museum. The survivors of the team brought home a vast body of knowledge, but surrendered their greatest discovery, the Rosetta Stone, to conquering British troops. The result of the savants' work was the 24-volume Description of Egypt, magnificently illustrated with engravings and maps, which helped launch Egyptomania and the "rape of the Nile," though Burleigh's discussion of this is scanty. Still, Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) offers an absorbing glimpse of Napoleon's thwarted bid for a grand French empire and its intellectual fruits. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

If you enjoy delving into small crevices of the past looking for little-considered gems of history, then Burleigh's (The Stranger and the Statesman) latest is for you. Focusing on Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798-1801 and particularly on the scientists who accompanied the military forces, Burleigh illuminates an unfamiliar moment in the history of science. It is well known that Napoleon's expedition uncovered the Rosetta stone, but the 151 scholars who accompanied the expedition also described for the first time the physics of a mirage, developed descriptive geometry, and laid the foundation of modern scientific archaeology. They did all this while learning to live with sand storms, leech-infested water, sometimes hostile Egyptians, and the plague. Burleigh's storytelling ability is mesmerizing; she skillfully fills in the backstory of the region in artfully crafted paragraphs, summing up thousands of years of history without slowing the flow of the narrative. This is not an in-depth study of the subject, but it would fit well in the popular science section of a public library.-Ann Forister, Roseville, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.