Alexander Mikaberidze’s The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History is not perfect — but it is very, very good, and deserves to be read. Should it be your first book on Napoleon and his wars? Probably not. If you have to begin somewhere, begin with Andrew Robert’s outstanding 2014 biography, which is an essential and (to my mind) unsurpassed English-language apologia for the Emperor. Then delve into David Chandler’s definitive 1973 The Campaigns of Napoleon, not for a narrative read, but for in-depth illumination of the operational genius and tragedy on exposition in Roberts’s work.