I don't know if this counts as a poll question or not, but I feel like I'm asking for an opinion on a book rather than on a favorite fact or something. If i'm wrong, then no hard feelings if this post has to be removed.
I'm interested in all of history, so the categorical separation in the literary recommendation FAQ isn't going to help me here. I've heard, for example, about a book about the French Revolution + Napoleon that's epic in scale. I would just like something that reads a bit like a story and is grandiose in scale. It doesn't really matter what it's about.
I loved Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley. People don't realize how much of a threat the Ottoman Empire was to Europe. There are times when the book reads like a suspense novel. The audiobook is also excellent.
And of course, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is amazing. If someone tried to write it as fiction, they'd be laughed at for coming up with such ridiculous, larger-than-life characters.
David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon is a behemoth of a work that is extremely difficult to find. It's some 1200 page epic on, well, all the campaigns of napoleon written in a very easy to read manner.
The Story of Civilization - Will and Ariel Durant.
You want epic? Pre-history through the age of Napoleon. And quite a page turner.
While it might be a bit more lacking as far as being writeen as a story, C.V. Wedgewood's The Thirty Years War gives a long an in depth look into what--I consider at least--one of the most important and interesting conflict in the rise of the modern world.
For a primary source I really enjoyed Heinz Guderian's Achtung - Panzer!. For something more exciting in the same vein would be Rommel's book "Infantry Attacks". A lot of it is Rommel's stories from WWI.
Parker's 'Global Crisis' is pretty epic- loads of the world experienced famine/ war/ revolution/ natural disasters around the same time. Why? How did they deal with them. It's a different kind of history book than many I've come across.
I would recommend A Struggle for Power by Theodore Draper. I would recommend all Americans read this.