What a soap opera! Napoleon and the Rebel, a bio on the emperor’s younger, more handsome, more cultivated, and arguably smarter brother Lucien, is is juicy love story full of inside scoop on the Bonaparte clan, which fought amongst itself while Napoleon took Europe, one country at a time, in the early 19th century. Though Lucien was a capable orator and a leader in the new republican France–saving his brother’s butt on several occasions–he gave up political life in order to stay with the woman he loved. The real-life tale is similar to that of Edward VIII, the Brit who abdicated to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. In Lucien’s case, it was not marital history or nationality that made Alexandrine de Bleschamp an undesirable among the Bonapartes. It was that Napoleon–who decreed that all marriages in what he dubbed the “consular dynasty” be approved by himself–wanted Lucien to marry a member of European royalty in order to strengthen his empire. (So much for the republic…) It didn’t help that Napoleon once had an unrequited crush on Alexandrine. This page-turner benefits from Lucien’s detailed memoirs, offering a crystalline view of life in the First Republic.