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[[File:Napoleon_Dwyer.jpg|left|thumbnail|250px|[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300137540/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0300137540&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=958d1d18bfc9100dcf8f584bc785b993 Napoleon: The Path to Power] by Philip Dwyer]]
* [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190262710/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0190262710&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=9e5489c19c2878dc6982b2a94c21fa6a Napoleon: A Concise Biography] by David A. Bell
David Bell emphasizes the astonishing sense of human possibility--for both good and ill--that Napoleon represented. By his late twenties, Napoleon was already one of the greatest generals in European history. At thirty, he had become an absolute master of Europe's most powerful country. In his early forties, he ruled a European empire more powerful than any since Rome, fighting wars that changed the shape of the continent and brought death to millions. Then everything collapsed, leading him to spend his last years in miserable exile in the South Atlantic.
Bell emphasizes the importance of the French Revolution in understanding Napoleon's career. The revolution made possible the unprecedented concentration of political authority that Napoleon accrued, and his success in mobilizing human and material resources. Without the political changes brought about by the revolution, Napoleon could not have fought his wars. Without the wars, he could not have seized and held onto power. Though his virtual dictatorship betrayed the ideals of liberty and equality, his life and career were revolutionary.
* [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0025236601/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0025236601&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=ad50ad39e3f61889d2fdf8820820d856 The Campaigns of Napoleon] by David G Chandler
The Napoleonic war was wars were nothing if not complex—an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of moves and intentions, which by themselves went a long way towards baffling and dazing his conventionally-minded opponents into that state of disconcerting moral disequilibrium which so often resulted in their catastrophic defeat.
The Campaigns of Napoleon is an exhaustive analysis and critique of Napoleon's art of war as he himself developed and perfected it in the major military campaigns of his career. Napoleon disavowed any suggestion that he worked from formula (“Je n'ai jamais eu un plan d'opérations”), but military historian David Chandler demonstrates this was at best only a half-truth. To be sure, every operation Napoleon conducted contained unique improvisatory features. But there were from the first to the last certain basic principles of strategic maneuver and battlefield planning that he almost invariably put into practice. To clarify these underlying methods, as well as the style of Napoleon's fabulous intellect, Mr. Chandler examines in detail each campaign mounted and personally conducted by Napoleon, analyzing the strategies employed, revealing wherever possible the probable sources of his subject's military ideas.
