I haven't read it, but as it's based on what are referred to as "traditional" sources, that is, sources passed down as traditions, orally, purporting to be from the time of the prophet Muhammad, it will suffer from exactly the same problems that all such biographies have. Namely, those sources are incredibly dubious.

I always point people to Robert Hoyland's excellent and concise article on the issue "Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad: Problems and Solutions". (PDF warning). Basically all such biographies face a choice of either using the traditional sources, which are unreliable, or having almost no source material to write about.

As a result, if by academic you mean source critical, no I can't really think of any good source-critical biographies of the prophet, as I'm not sure you could write one.

With that said, your best bet might be to read Hoyland, keep those grains of salt about the sources firmly in hand, and then just read a translation of the Sira itself like Guillaume's The Life of Muhammad translation of the Sira of Ibn Hisham.

It depends on what you want to get out of it though. If you want to know what Muslims think of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, that's a good bet. If you want to know what academics think about early Islam I would point you towards either Fred Donner's Muhammad and the Believers or Robert Hoyland's In God's Path or maybe The Quran in its Historical Context. If you have something else in mind, feel free to ask.