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Title: Napoleon the bungler
Review: This book presents a novel and entirely frustrating view of Napoleon as a bumbling incompetent who barely knew one end of a cannon from the other. Despite his claims to "balance", Alan Schom's contempt for the French Emperor seethes through every hastily-written and poorly-edited page. Schom is probably right in his assessment of Napoleon as a self-aggrandising power monger, but portraying him as an egregious bungler stretches the reader's patience and credulity from the outset. It also signally fails to explain how this lowly Corsican gunnery lieutenant came to rule half of Europe before his mid-30s. As such, it is an unsatisfying read, ignoring the two most fascinating questions about Napoleon for the general reader - what drove him, and how did he do it? Buy it if you feel like wading through 800 pages of dispiriting vitriol.
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