Does anybody have any recommendations for books that would describe the French military-economic effort during the Napoleonic Wars ?

Could some of you scholarly folks recommend books for me about the Iran Contra affair and the savings and loan crisis of the 80s and 90s?

Recommendation for a detailed account of the Commonwealth D-Day landings at Gold, Juno and Sword? I have Balkoski's books on Utah and Omaha, looking for something similar.

I'm looking for any recommendations for Irish and broader European/Mediterranean botanical history, and cooking histories for the region. In so many words, I want to have a sense of what neolithic and bronze age people at least had available to eat in their region, and may have foraged for or at least known of.

As for recommendations go, I picked up The Greek Myths, by Robert Graves, and frankly every other compendium I've seen now looks very not-good by comparison. It purports to have every myth in it (and I can believe it), has loads of annotations to explain lost context or provide interpretive insight, and lists every permutation of a given myth. So, if you're looking for a good reference for Greek mythology, I'd say that's top tier. But maybe it's already considered the gold standard by academics, and I'm just some troglodyte who's showed up yammering about this great new thing called "sliced bread." The reviews seemed positive so I hope I'm not recommending bunk.

I'd also recommend the Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe, by Marcel De Cleene and Marie Claire Lejeune. It's truly fascinating, and while it only had half of what I was looking for, I'm not unsatisfied with it. Symbology is really cool stuff.

Also, on the subject of historiography, a thought occurred to me the other day. It seems as though a substantial portion of historical conflicts can be framed as a struggle between the rural and the urban. Both the rural and the urban, due to the circumstances of their environment, tend to have different needs and different cultures, and this in turn tends to cause friction. I'd elaborate more on what specific environmental differences drive different needs and cultural trends, but I don't want this post to get too long. Suffice it to say that population (in terms of count and density) is the primary environmental factor which spurs the two in different directions. An easy example of a semi-trivial difference is the more rapid pace of linguistic drift in urban areas. More speakers means more people messing with the language. With fewer speakers, rural areas display a much slower rate of linguistic change.

If I am right in saying that the interpretive framework of the Marxist school of history is founded on the notion of class and class struggle (and I know that isn't really right, but I oversimplify for brevity), then it stands to reason that a school founded on the notion of rural/urban competition could be just as legitimate. Which leads me to the question - does such a school exist? Or has this type of analysis found its home in an existing school? Or is the examination of this dynamic not really common in present historical analysis? If so, why not?

Looking for suggestions on a couple different topics:

• strange medieval histories (about bizarre figures and events like the Cadaver Synod)
• biographies of saints and histories of the mythologies surrounding them, especially from the early church thru Middle Ages
• any good reads on royalty, clergy, knights and witches during Middle Ages

Thank you! :)

Does anyone have any recommendations for readings about famines or plagues? Not really looking for any period in particular