The book describes fairly well about Napoleon’s life-time struggle as a minority from tiny island Corsica, stuck between Italy and France, along with his dramatic path towards the power and fall. But the book makes one huge mistake: It suddenly moves from Russian campaign in 1812 to Napoleon’s abdication and exile to Elba in 1814 without any explanation, not even a simple chronological course of events in-between them.
As a matter of fact, throughout our Human history, many empires have fallen after their most ambitious military campaign failed; not to mention the one of Napoleon’s we’ve just learned about, one of the world empires built in modern-day China, Sui Empire, did collapse after its grand campaign over the hegemony of the ancient Far East region, and so did Toyotomi's regime in Japan after its invasion of the continent failed.
The reason’s clear because a long war without any success only makes the invading country people mad due to their burden of excessive tax and physical sacrifice in military service in a foreign soil, which makes them stay far away from their home, family and daily work for living.
But after Napoleon's failure of his Russian campaign the author mentions nothing about the angry French people's sentiment, but only their never-dying love of Napoleon.
There are also many rules that didn't perish after a disastrous military campaign like Tang Taizong's invasion of [ancient] Coree'o (Co Dynasty), Khitan-Liao Emperor's disastrous failure in [medieval] Coree'o (Wang Dynasty), Persian Empire of Darius I and his son Xerxes after their ambitious war on Greece, and so forth.
Therefore, it is not clear if Napoleon's failure in Russia was the real reason for his downfall. The book doesn’t even mention about anything that happened in that period, leaving a big, disappointing hole in this significant event of our history.
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