This book is eminently readable. Not only does Boot use a wide-ranging vocabulary, but his narrative style is light and fresh. He turns descriptions of relatively obscure 19th-century imperial battles between usually poorly balanced adversaries into informative, compelling tales.
As a scholar, I find his method of source citation frustrating. Instead of using footnotes or endnotes, he opts for that (weird) system - often employed in mass media books - that uses a set of brief quotations at the end of the book as a place to indicate what the sources were, as well as to add author marginalia. I despise having to flip back and forth to this information gulag speculatively, in the hopes that the author has provided some sources. I recognize that this is my pet peeve, however, and not really a weakness on Boot's part.
His personal politics are fairly obvious, thought not off-putting (at least to this reader). He is clearly an apologist for American imperial power, though certainly not blind to the risks and negative outcomes that application and extension of that power has produced in developing or non-developed societies.
Fuller comments will follow eventually.
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