"One Hundred Days"

One Hundred Days: Napoleon's Road to Waterloo (Alan Schom)

This one you can judge by its cover. I guess I'm kind of starting at the end with Napoleon here; spoiler alert. What I liked about this book is that the author didn't just cover Waterloo - in fact, the entire military campaign makes up maybe a fifth of the book. This leaves the rest to what I really wanted to see, namely
Napoleon's governance of France and to a small extent planning for the future (it's to a small extent as he doesn't seem to have thought much past battling the rest of Europe, and of course he never got the chance after that).
That would make it an easy recommend (for history nerds), but there is one warning I'd issue: Schom stops to drop in biographies of all the major players as we run across them. This is puzzling for two reasons; one, I would assume that most readers had the sense (unlike me) to read other books about Napoleon first instead of starting at the end, and would already have this information. Two, the biographies are largely pointless as most of the characters get so little screen time that their introductory biographies are longer than all the rest of the text featuring them put together. I'd say just skip 'em.
Other than this issue, and probably recommending reading this as a endcap, the bulk of the text covers an area of study that's esoteric enough that this is the only book I've seen covering it, and that makes it pretty easy to recommend.

Grade: B+