Napoleon's Wars: An International History, 1803-1815

This book is great at what it does, but what it does is not what I hoped for.

This is a broad overview of Napoleon, with a particularly detailed examination of his part in the wars that dominated Europe during the early 19th century.

What it is not, disappointingly, is a narrative of the battles themselves.

I had presumed, given the book's title and length, was that I was buying a detailed examination of napoleonic battlefield strategy and tactics. While I have only made it 1/3 through this work, I can confidently state that there is none of this.

Instead, we hear a lot of "and then Napoleon defeated the Austrians at this spot, then they formed an alliance and defeated the Germans at that spot, etc etc."

I should also point out that this book presumes a fairly extensive understanding of European geography (particularly historic geography) on the part of the reader. Without a map of current and past geographic features as a companion, this work quickly becomes inaccessible.

I guess if you are doing a research paper on the Emporer this might be a good book to have, and perhaps if reading it, it might work, but as an audio it doesn't. It is fairly dry and dull. Napoleon was an exciting leader. I suspect the main purpose of this book is for a college course on Napoleon, if so it is fine, for general reading there are better books.

This book does not live up to the promise of answering the question, "What was it that made the countries of Europe fight one another for so long and with such devastating results?"

I expected an analysis of the allies, in the style of Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals". Or a study of the period and cultures, like Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror".

Instead, the first third is a litany of observations about the decade before Napoleon came to power, that only make sense to someone already familiar with that period of history. If you don't know the difference between a Jacobin and a Jacobite, or the Terror and the Directory, or the story behind a "whiff of grapeshot", you might as well skip this section.

The second section goes into more traditional historical detail about the peninsular war and skirmishes in South America, but they are typically brief and unsatisfying. Foreign ministers are named, and treaties are cited, but with scant detail about motivations or consequences.

The third section pays the usual homage to Napoleon's foray into Russia, interleaving a brief mention of the War of 1812 in the U.S. with the morbid accounts of the retreating French.

It is a thin sketch with few broad strokes, that doesn't provide an overall picture.

The main theme is that Napoleon's Wars were a product of a personal psychological and political need for continual military victories to maintain legitimacy. At every opportunity, when peace was possible and even achieved, Napoleon chose to pick new fights and maintain a perpetual state of war.

David Wetzel's lectures are a much better alternative to this book, such as History 162A - Empires, Wars, and Nations 1648-1914 - Fall 2012 UC Berkeley, available on iTunesU.

This well-narrated and well-written book is giving me the background I need to teach a history-and-literature series on the aftermath of the American Revolution in Europe. The narrative has helped me begin to understand the confusing complexities of the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Prior to this book, we read aloud and studied Unlikely Allies, The Great Upheaval, and of course Tale of Two Cities. In conjunction with it we are studying The War for All the Oceans (by Adkins) and Tolstoy's War and Peace (the latter using Audible's audiobook also). In addition, the Sharpe series by Cornwell is providing some additional relaxed level historical fiction as we read through those in order. Esdaile's narration is a pleasure to listen to. (I have a hard copy of the book but am a bit too busy now to sit down with it much, so the audio keeps me going; I drop in post-it notes at the parts I want to relate to my high schooler.) (By the way, I'm a veteran home school mother and a retired physician. All my children have loved history taught using this approach.)

This book was just average. For the most part, I found it boring but at the same time, there are some other parts that I found to be very interesting especially the third part.