Napoleon Bonaparte

This is the most remarkable biography I have ever read.

I have a basic grasp of the Napoleonic era, and have read histories of the Peninsular War and the Russian Campaign and the like, but I have never read such a clear and evocative precis of the little Corsican sociopath himself.

Like the little Austrian sociopath 150 years later, the man himself diminishes the more you know about him. The child of a rebellious political environment, always arrogant and self-aggrandizing, he changed the face of Europe for the worse, killing upwards of three million human beings and wounding and assaulting untold millions more in the process.

A brilliant, energetic and improvisational general, he never mastered the disciplines of logistics and intelligence the way his ultimate nemesis, Wellington, did. Alan Schom details his pattern of failure from the abortive and incompetently executed Egyptian campaign onwards, and documents the same mistakes made over and over by a arrogant little prick who was so self-involved he was incapable of learning from his spectacular and deadly mistakes.

The only thing lacking–which is hardly a critique of this masterful biography!–is an examination of the sociology of dictatorship. How is it that such spectacularly incompetent administrators repeatedly insinuate themselves into the highest offices, from the Roman Republic to modern day developing nations to the rather broken republic to our south (I am writing this from Canada)?

If you want to learn more about how the political landscape of Europe was reshaped 200 years ago by a disgusting nutjob and his legions of emotionally-addled followers, you could not do better than read this meticulous, lively and well-reference work.