Smudge Marks & Engel Werks Flash of Steel Wargame [space] Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsThe start of epic fantasy stories often have a pacing problem. The desire to provide lots of background, and root you in an unfamiliar world mean that the plot moves like a freight train. It has a lot of momentum,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is intended as a short book for the National Parks service to sell as part of their memorial to the Battle of Lake Erie. The author was originally intending a much longer, definitive, work on the battle, which I[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Norwich’s book on the beginning of the Sixteenth Century successfully covers a lot of ground, is a great, somewhat light, read, and if you’re like me, perhaps to be missed. I do generally recommend the book, and if you know[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The fourth book of the excellent Hundred Years War series by Jonathan Sumption picks up in 1400, with a visit by Byzantine Emperor Manuel II to Paris. This echoes the start of the first book with the funeral procession of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The third Vatta’s War book picks up where the second left off, but keeps itself largely on immediate concerns, instead of doing a lot with the big McGuffin-related issued that dominate the second book. Mostly, that’s because there’s other issues[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
R.F. Delderfield is mostly known for fiction, but this book shows he was quite good at popular non-history as well (his fiction was mostly historical, so the two do go together). In this case, he’s looking at Napoleon from after[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It took six years for the final volume of this trilogy to come out, and given the page count takes another two-hundred page jump upwards, I imagine it was in the category of ‘the book that ate his life’. The[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Bryant’s third book of the Napoleonic era starts with Wellington in the Peninsula in front of Badajoz, while Napoleon faces the Sixth Coalition in Germany. This is very much English-centric history, so the focus is entirely on the Spanish front.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Gill’s third book has Wagram and Znaim as the subtitle, and these battles are indeed important to the volume. However, we finally get a proper recounting of events elsewhere (other than Italy, which was covered previously, though the sequel to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second volume of the Fire Bearers trilogy expands the world, and the scope of the plot, with the book jumping up a hundred pages in length to compensate. The first volume left off in a bit of a quiet[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…