it seems recent scholarship on the Napoleonic wars focus on the later years of the napoleonic wars and the decline of Napoleon's empire: John Gill - Thunder on the Danube (1809 onwards), Dominic Lieven - Russian and Napoleon (1812 onwards) and Michael Leggiere - Napoleon and the Struggle for Germany (1813 onwards), are the books I have. And then there are countless books on Waterloo.
I know little about the early campaigns, diplomacy and politics of the Napoleonic Wars. What are the best books that focus on this early part of the wars and the building of Napoleon's empire.
The latter half of the wars are going through something of a renaissance of sorts, and this is a good thing because these campaigns have been very poorly served (prior to Leggiere, the best books on Leipzig were from the turn of the century- i.e. when there still was a Habsburg empire!). For Napoleon's first campaign, The Road to Rivoli: Napoleon's First Campaign by Martin Boycott-Brown is a detailed description of Italy. Marengo and Hohenlinden: Napoleon's Rise to Power by James Arnold likewise covers Napoleon's first campaign as First Consul. Frederick C. Schneid's anthology European Armies of the French Revolution, 1789–1802 covers a lot of ground with the various armies of the period and how the Revolutionary period was a transitional period for all concerned. John A. Lynn's The Bayonets Of The Republic: Motivation And Tactics In The Army Of Revolutionary France, 1791-94 is a classic in the field and studies the Armée du Nord and was part of the vanguard of the "new" military history that looked beyond tactical maps and general and more on armies as social institutions. For a a long-range view of French politics, two works by Isser Woloch are good to examine: The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s and Napoleon and His Collaborators.