The Citadel of Weeping Pearls

by on March 5, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

As with other Ailette de Bodard stories I have read, this is a largely character-focused story with unfamiliar signposts.

In this case, we have three different stories going on at the same time, but they’re all focused on the same thing: the titular station, which disappeared thirty years ago.

It was a place of beauty and science, of wonders the likes of which have not been seen since.

Of a daughter of the Empress, who was driven to flee to the far bounds of space and time rather than fight her mother, who had become too worried over what this place could become.

Thirty years later, the disappearance of the Citadel of Weeping Pearls is still such a turning point that it attracts the attention of the three plot lines mentioned before. This gives the book a mix of mystery, time travel, and court intrigue. All three are well done, but I do find the structure a bit bare for my tastes.

However, the atmosphere and tone of the book are extremely well done. Again, that’s less to my tastes, but I do recommend it because it’s that well done. I’d recommend The Tea Master and the Detective as my favorite of the Xuya stories so far, but there is no reason to avoid this one at all.

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Post-Roman Kingdoms: ‘Dark Ages’ Gaul & Britain, AD 450–800

by on February 26, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is a bit surprising as an ‘Elite’ book in Osprey’s line, but it is certainly worth the extra pages over a regular Men-At-Arms book. I am also happy to see post-Roman Gaul and Britain considered together, especially as this is the period were Brittany developed its separate identity from absorbing refugees from Britain (which is touched on here).

Even at 64 pages, this is still too thin of a book to go into any real detail, and as ever, the strengths are in the visual reference. Sadly, Andrei Negin’s color plates are workmanlike, but hardly a source of inspiration. All of them at least have some form of background to place the type of environment these people are dealing with in, but they are solidly in the camp of standing around posing for the viewer instead of interacting, showing movement and use of equipment, and overall just being a rough miniatures painting guide.

The text itself also feels more surface level than usual. The initial sections do discuss the different paths of the various parts of Gaul, and then the notional high-level military organization of each, and then tackles Britain. Then we get the usual discussion of period equipment, with good notes of who was likely using what, and the likelihood of items being handed down (some more meditation on just how much equipment was made in Roman Gaul compared to sub- or post-Roman Gaul could be interesting here, but probably too scholarly for a enthusiast-facing book).

Beyond some of the general history, and brief mention of some of Arthur’s campaigns in the earliest sources, there’s not a lot of history here. No recounting of some of the battles of the period (admittedly, sources are the toughest part here, but it is still non-zero), to pick out bits about how armies in this period campaigned. Overall, the book feels very light and unfocused because of it. That said, there is reference to many of the early sources, some thoughts about the worth of some ‘later’ ones that seem to go back in oral tradition to this period, and as ever there is lots of good photography of artifacts and art, leaving visual reference as one of the stronger points of the book.

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The Storm Before the Storm

by on February 10, 2024 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I started listening to podcasts at just the right time: There was a minor explosion of good historical subjects going on. This was largely due to Mike Duncan, and his History of Rome podcast. Not that you can tell by listening to the very early episodes; it took a while for his delivery to loosen up and become a very good podcast.

But it did become a very good podcast, and so is his later Revolutions podcast. So, I’m a little embarrassed that it’s taken me seven years to read his first book, especially since its a look at a period of Roman history that needs more attention.

And hey, Mike Duncan agrees with me, it’s why he wrote this particular book. This is a popular history book, and even less dense than most of those. It’s not particularly long, coming in at 265 pages in hardcover.

But, then there’s extensive endnotes, and a lengthy index. While this is geared to someone just taking an interest in history, all the tools to dig deeper are provided. In fact, the endnotes are particularly geared at getting you to the relevant primary sources. This is great place to begin if you want to develop an interest in the period. (One entry in the index, “murders”, then references eleven people killed in his narrative, and then cross-references to “killings, political”, with another seven sub-entries.)

And I should mention that period covers from the first real crisis of the Republic, the rise of the Gracchi brothers, and gives some nice background to the social forces at play at the time. From there, Duncan goes on to events in Africa and Spain, with Jugurtha rising to power, and the troubles in Spain leading to the siege of Numantia, and then to Marius and Sulla, whose attempt to rework the Republic into something more stable concludes the book (along with Duncan’s thoughts on why it didn’t work). So, for those of you used to McCullough’s Master of Rome series, the first half of this is before the series, and covers everything she talks about from before the first book, through the first three books of the series.

Duncan’s prose is very readable, the contents very informative, and overall he takes as neutral a stance as possible on what unfolds in his pages. Even if you’ve read up on Roman history, 146–78 BC is a period you may know much about, and this is a very good starter book on the period.

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Prairie and War Years

by on February 2, 2024 at 12:00 pm
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So far as I know, Carl Sandburg is hardly known today, though my edition of this set starts with a recounting of a speech he was invited to make before Congress. Generally, he was a poet, but became so fascinated by Abraham Lincoln he wrote a two-volume biography of his life before becoming president. That fired Sandburg’s interest so much he went on to write a further four volumes on the remaining five years of Lincoln’s life.

That was written from 1926 to 1939. In the ’50s, he condensed those six books down to three, and in the ’60s they made the transition to paperback, and my edition is the eighth Dell printing in 1968.

A roughly forty-year run as a popular biography is no small feat.

The telescoping of time is more pronounced than the above mention alludes to, as the third book (part two of The War Years) is merely the last year of Lincoln’s life. Some of this is natural, as relatively little is known of Lincoln’s younger life, needing to rely on memories recounted later by him and people who knew him, while the mass of correspondence and records grow denser later in life.

The split between the first two books is pretty obvious; The Prairie Years leaves off with Lincoln leaving Illinois for Washington D.C., and The War Years picks up with his tour east, and the concerns about the possibility of an assassination attempt on the way. Part two of The War Years picks up with the fight over the Republican nomination in 1864. Two-term presidents had been unknown since Jackson (thirty years before), and pretty much every Republican senator wanted a crack at it instead of him.

All along, we get stories of Lincoln’s stories, but these also become more prominent as the biography goes on. Given how they were a large part of how he explained his thoughts to others, it would be impossible to do without them. We also get plenty of quotes from newspapers and speeches friendly and hostile to him, and a good sense of how he was perceived at the time is given. Only two of Lincoln’s speeches are given in full (Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural, naturally), though a third comes in for a number of mentions (A House Divided). This is popular history, so the story of the Civil War is bound up in here, and generally not assumed that the reader knows the salient particulars, But, it is generally told from the viewpoint of the White House.

Overall, it’s well written and recommended. If you study the Civil War, there’s a lot that will be familiar, but there’s a lot of material that would be easy to have missed unless you’ve studied Lincoln in particular.

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Chicks and Balances

by on January 25, 2024 at 12:00 pm
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This latest book of the Chicks in Chainmail anthology series (with an 11-year gap between the last two, the next one is due in 2026) holds to the same general theme and sense of humor.

It leads off with Jody Lynn Nye’s “A Chick Off the Old Block”, is weakened by punching up the drama with overreactions from the viewpoint character, but is otherwise a solid, somewhat by the numbers adventure. Competently done, but the strengths don’t entirely make up for the weaknesses. At the other end, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Fashion and the Snarkmeisters” is a lot more inventive, and I think she’s getting something off her chest.

In between, we get the wide mix of styles and genres, including one truly SF story (“Saving Private Slime” by Louisa Swann, which was a good reminder of why I really should be reading more SF short stories).

I would normally list the other highlights as part of this review, but frankly I’d list about half the stories here. I have generally enjoyed all the stories in this series, but while there’s no obvious standouts here, part of the reason seems to be I overall enjoyed them more, so it’d have taken even more to rise up from the pack.

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