Roberts does an excellent job of squeezing Napolean's life into this one volume. He covers military, political, and personal aspects of NB's life. The biography is easy to read, well-referenced, and includes some information from a recently published massive collection of Napolean's letters. I don't have any major complaints, but...

There is no real political or psychological analysis, just reportage. That's fine, I suppose the reader can draw their own conclusions, and it reduces the size of the biography, but if a work is simplified in this way it seems less significant and reading it may seem like a less important use of your time.

The maps vary in quality and there should be at least a few more. The author is only fair in his ability to describe battles geographically. While reading this I bought the atlas of battles in the Napoleonic Wars in the West Point series, but I didn't care for it either.

I can't be sure, but the main use of the author's review of Napolean's letters seems to be the discovery that he was a micromanager and took his job as emperor seriously. This is mostly revealed in footnotes and gets a little tedious after the first several of these cataloging what odd thing or other Napolean was writing to some minor official about.

In discussing Napolean's postmortem findings, the author states that benign gastric ulcers used to sometimes become malignant before the invention of acid-arresting medication. This is some kind of garbled misunderstanding. (I won't explain Helicobacter pylori here or the difference between gastro-esophageal junction and gastric body carcinomas.)