My friend Nina Burleigh has written a new book, “Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt,” that gets a terrific review in today’s Times book review.

Mirage is about Napoleon’s ill-fated occupation of Egypt in 1798, which didn’t go so well for the little general—or his soldiers.

In “Mirage,” Burleigh’s description of a young army overdressed for the sweltering heat (in Alpine wool uniforms), afraid and unable to communicate with the increasingly hostile locals, also has echoes of the present. Her principal subject, however, is not the military but the 151 “savants” Napoleon took along — geologists, mapmakers, naturalists, artists, even a musicologist.

….Burleigh, a journalist and the author of “A Very Private Woman,” a well-received account of the 1964 murder of the prominent Washington figure Mary Meyer, hurtles in less than 250 pages through the three grueling years the savants spent in Egypt, peppering her tale with multitudes of facts, digressions and anecdotes.….

It sounds like a fascinating book, and I’m not just saying that because Nina’s an old friend….