Over the River

by on July 21, 2014 at 8:23 pm
Posted In: Books

First, a couple notes: The author is my dad; I’m trying to be evenhanded in this review, but that bias is there. This book is self-published through CreateSpace, and my copy started coming apart on my first read-through. A couple pages popped out on their own, and many more are sticking and threatening to go. I’m not sure if I’m just unlucky, or if CreateSpace has trouble with 600+ page books (the theoretical maximum length is 800). Also, the electronic version of the book has trouble, and can’t be recommended; this is being worked on, and I’ll update when the problems are fixed.

Over the River is a chronological (day-by-day) reconstruction of the events in the American Civil War from March 23rd to May 22nd, 1863, which saw two nearly simultaneous Union offensives. It is effectively the first book of a series on the war in 1863 (which is a companion to Lowry’s 1864-5 series that was published in the early ’90s), but stands alone without any problems.

The actual narrative content is less than might be supposed, as the book fairly extensively quotes from various primary sources (generally noting the difference between reports at the time and recollections years later). These are critiqued at points where there are mistakes, or perhaps ‘spun’. And then every once in a while the book stops and takes time out to examine the larger meaning of events, which doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, though the afterword has in interesting analysis of the similarities between Grant’s and Hooker’s positions and opening moves, and how the two campaigns eventually ended up with very different results.

It is a particularly interesting period to cover in this format. Hooker’s movement across the Rapidan started within a day or so of Grant’s major movements to get his army across the Mississippi south of Vicksburg. The central third of the book is largely occupied with the Battle of Chancellorsville, and then Grant’s campaign in Mississippi gets exciting just as the Army of the Potomac withdraws back across the Rapidan.

Along the way, the structure makes other things fit together well, most notably the extreme delays in communication between Grant (in northern Mississippi, working south) and Banks (in Louisiana, trying to work north), since all messages had to go the long way through telegraph connections to the east coast, and by ship through the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

In the end, it is probably too detailed for a reader new to the ACW wanting a more general history or overview, and not deep enough for someone well-versed in the war looking for new insights. But the chronological framework is a very interesting view for the Civil War buff used to more bite-sized chunks of the war, and plenty of basic explanations are given for those not well-versed in the military history of the time.

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Up Front

by on July 13, 2014 at 9:19 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch made it over for some FtF gaming yesterday. I was a little shocked that he’s feeling a little burnt out on ASL. But he seems okay since he was wanting to play Up Front, which he got a copy of last year. I’ve known of it since it came out, and I can remember a couple people at the Vista gaming group playing it a bunch, but I’d never really looked at it myself.

It is pretty ingenious. Each scenario specifies the forces each side gets (which are individual men with associated weapons on small numbered cards with all their details), and the victory conditions. There’s a main deck with ‘actions’ (fire, movement, rally…), terrain, and some other events. Scenarios modify the general ‘feel’ of the terrain by making you toss out the first few instances of a terrain type that doesn’t fit. There’s a fairly simple system for keeping track of how close various groups are to the enemy, with complications allowing a group to flank the enemy, get behind them, etc.

Patch had only ever soloed the game, and was wondering about the time limits the scenarios impose in terms of multiple play-throughs of the main deck. Seemed like it was unlikely get more than halfway through the deck once.

Well, our games went longer, but the initial scenario (“A Meeting of Patrols”) is short, so it didn’t go much longer. We played it twice, swapping sides (and which Allied force was involved), and I managed to win both times by getting groups up to Range 4 in cover while keeping Patch tied up with streams and similar movement blocking cards.

After that we tried “City Fight”, which is slightly bigger and more complicated, and Patch just completely disassembled my force in that one, ending with multiple men infiltrating my positions and taking me out in Close Combat.

Then we went for “Elite Troops on the Attack”, a two-round scenario with Patch’s SS attacking my green Americans. Patch took the first round after a drawn out fight that again saw my guys go down pretty hard. The defender gets exactly the same force for the second round, but the attacker only gets his surviving guys (including anyone who routed out of the game), but I’d only managed one kill the first time. However, the second round went much better for me, with a drawn-out fight coming down to the wire that left both of us with shattered forces, until Patch no longer had the men for a victory.

We didn’t have anything else going on yesterday, and so went a couple hours later than normal with one more game, “Rear Guard Action”, with the idea of trying out the ordnance rules. Sadly, they didn’t get much of a workout, as Patch’s mortar (the only ordnance in the scenario) malfunctioned on the second shot. Patch came on strong for a while, but I got both of my oversized Russian groups on hills, and the extra firepower effect from them helped grind him down, along with the deck. The scenario finished on time (three play-throughs of the deck) with the Germans in seriously bad shape.In all, it’s a fun and fast game. Everything is necessarily abstract, so all the scenarios are generic ‘situations’, which causes me to miss the ‘history’ of SL/ASL scenarios. It’s also at the man-to-man level, where I tend to prefer higher-level games. But, we’ll certainly be playing more of it in the future, quite likely as part of our Vassal rotation.

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From Raiders to Kings

by on June 29, 2014 at 10:50 pm
Posted In: Books

Lars Brownworth’s first book catapulted to success on the back of a related podcast, and he used the same formula this time. The Norman Centuries has been another good history podcast from him (though very slow, fourteen episodes in four years, and a note saying the next episode is under production is still the most recent note a year later), and his latest book is more directly tied to it than the first time. With Byzantium he covered (in passing) most the entire history in the book, and picked the highlights for the podcast; with the Normans, it feels more like like each chapter is one of the podcast episodes.

The Normans only held sway in Europe for a couple of centuries, and Brownworth’s writing is stronger for having a more limited subject than the thousand-year life of the Eastern Roman Empire to talk about. As always, he does a great job with bringing history to life, and is at his best describing larger-than-life characters. The Normans provide plenty of larger-than-life people to write about.

My biggest complaint is that the book skips around more than I’d like in time. It starts with Normandy and the conquest of England, before stepping back to the early Norman conquests in southern Italy. The book then goes on to a brief history of the founding of the Crusader state of Antioch, and then spends the bulk of its time talking about the Kingdom of Sicily. The other complaint is that it’s all about the big-name leaders, and nothing outside of that. But, as a light popular history, that is what the book is about, and as I already said Brownworth handles them very well, and very enjoyably.

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After Tamerlane

by on June 21, 2014 at 9:53 am
Posted In: Books

John Darwin’s After Tamerlane is a look at empire making from 1400 to pretty much the current day. His beginning idea is that the Timurid state represents the last time that the age-old pattern of a vast Eurasian empire based out of the Iranian plateau played out, and he then goes on to examine the patterns of force that happened in place of this usual pattern of empire.

He effectively splits the Eurasian land-mass into four parts: Europe, Middle East, India, China, and examines what was going on in each of these places as the centuries roll on. As he stays pretty much in a chronological frame work, this makes the book handy just as a cross-reference to which periods are contemporaneous. However, those four general regions don’t quite add up to all of Eurasia, and he actually says surprisingly little about the region of Iran/Persia (and precious little about southeast Asia and inland central Asia, but that is less surprising).

Any book covering from 1400 on is pretty much going to be about the rise of European states to dominant roles in the world, but the emphasis here is on re-balancing the traditional triumphalist narratives that see this as an inevitable result of superior European culture. He very carefully points out just how constrained early European ventures were, and how limited the actual effects of most colonial ventures were. I think he is a little too strident on this at times, pointing out just how limited the initial Portuguese trade around Africa to India was, without really acknowledging that no one else was really able to skip an entire large zone of trade to get at the next one beyond it.

If there is a major failing to the book, it is that after Darwin successfully shows the non-empire-building motivations of several earlier eras, in the 20th century he tends to assume most empire-building that was going on had more consistent motives and agendas than they did.

In all, this is good big-picture history that tries to remove a lot of Eurocentric bias, and will certainly give the reader plenty to think about.

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Medieval Russian Fortresses

by on June 18, 2014 at 10:48 pm
Posted In: Books

Osprey’s Fortress series is quite interesting, as it tackles all sorts of subjects I had not thought about (nor seen anything else on), as well as more familiar ground. For example, I’m used to seeing quite a bit about western European castles (which probably are siege engineering at its most interesting), and I know how much of that was borrowed from what was in already developed in the Near East, but, there’s almost nothing outside of that.

This volume is a very good, and dense, introduction to the fortifications of the Medieval ‘Rus, and shows off a number of features not seen in the more familiar west. Most fortifications were simply earthen ramparts with wooden walls on top (stone fortifications generally came much later than elsewhwere). The Kievan state built ‘snake ramparts’ that ran for over 500 miles to protect the southern borders. The common forms of all of these and these are explained in some detail, with common features and styles gone into.

In all, the book suffers most from having to be crammed into the standard Osprey page count, but still manages to give a pretty good look at most everything, and as usual, illustrations and photographs go a long way towards making everything clear.

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