The Army of Pyrrhus of Epirus

by on January 17, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This was a good idea for the subject of an Osprey book. While he’s remembered today for costly defeats thanks to the phrase ‘Pyrrhic victory’, in his time he was considered one of the best generals there was. And it should be remembered he did beat Rome at a time when other Hellenistic states were largely suffering catastrophic defeats by them.

Sadly, the coverage of his campaigns is very sparse. They are discussed, but only the Battle Asculum gets a diagram (some ways away from the history bit on it), and that’s just a basic look at the dispositions of allied contingents. The section on his army is similarly long on looks at the various types of troops, and less so on detailed looks at equipment.

There is the usual good map near the front of the region, but it could be better marked for which part is more properly Epirus. As it is, it takes some reading of the description and hunting on the map to piece it together.

Peter Dennis’ illustrations are nothing special (the cover piece is the best of the lot), but do illustrate the kind of equipment and symbols used. They do all at least some decent backgrounds to them, and attempt to show men doing more than standing around for a fashion plate (which I’ve noted an occasional tendency to go back to, so I’m very happy to note the absence of it here). The bulk of the photos are black-and-white, but there are some color ones scattered about. Mostly, they’re nothing extra-special, especially if you have other books on related subjects, but they are all reproduced quite clearly.

So, if you have an interest in early-Roman/late-Diadochoi military history, this is a good short look at the subject. But, it is more of an extended essay, without some of the crunch that other similar Osprey books have had, so it is not as useful to, say, a miniatures wargamer.

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The Vulcan Academy Murders

by on January 9, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is a relatively early Star Trek novel and it shows. Vulcans were one of the obsessions of the early fandom (…with good reason), and this novel obviously flows out of that. The bulk of the novel happens on Vulcan, largely at the Academy of Science, and Sarek’s home.

It does a good job developing the glimpses given in The Original Series, and filling out Vulcan culture a bit. Even better, the strained relations between Sarek and Spock are handled very well, and are the main character-driving action of the novel.

Plot-wise, it is less successful. We start with a quick action sequence of the Enterprise against a Klingon ship that feels horribly cliche, but its entire purpose is to launch the main plot. One crewmember is injured beyond the ability of twenty-third century medicine to help, but there is an experimental procedure being developed on Vulcan….

Problems start plaguing the facility where this is happening, and it becomes apparent that what seemed like inexplicable malfunctions are murder….

Sadly, the murder mystery element to the novel is the weakest. A little more tension on whether it was murder or not might have helped, but one look at the title undermines anything that could be done on that question. Then the identity of the murderer isn’t that mysterious as there’s too few logical candidates. And some of the sub-threads from this are a bit weak thanks to amateurish writing that starts relying on too many exclamation marks (a problem Lorrah thankfully outgrew in all her further novels).

Overall, it’s actually a fairly solid novel, but purely for character and setting reasons. It has been decades since I read The IDIC Epidemic, which is a sequel of sorts (it starts shortly afterwards, and features some of the same secondary characters), which I enjoyed quite a bit, and was part of the motivation for reading this one. If I am remembering it well enough, it is Lorrah’s best book, but this is a good place to start before going on to it.

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The Galatians

by on December 25, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I happened upon a positive friend’s review at the same time this went on sale, and picked it up. I’m glad I did, it is a good book.

The name “Galatians” doesn’t mean much to anyone who has not spent a fair amount of time reading about the ancient world. They’re best loosely thought of as ‘eastern Gauls’. Which is to say they’re a Celtic people who went east and encountered Greeks instead of Romans. They had a short-lived kingdom in the middle of Asia Minor early in the Successors period, which is part of why they don’t get talked about as much, the Macedonian Soap Opera was going on around them.

Also, that’s not the best period for general knowledge, which tends to skip from Alexander straight to Rome. And the previous is also about the limit of what I knew. So, a lot of this book was new to me, going into what is known about their initial emergence into Greek knowledge around the Banat region of Serbia, some serious raids into Greece, and then the eventual settling into Asia Minor.

That last is the bulk of the book, because there’s a bit more known, and they were active for a good chunk of time before becoming a Roman province. A lot is still uncertain here, as there’s little in the way of records from them, causing everything to be from the viewpoint of looking into something of a blind spot in history.

So, even at its best, there’s not a lot of detail or certainty to be had here. So Grainger has done a fine job with the materials to hand, making everything as coherent as possible, and presenting everything quite clearly. It’s a bit of a niche subject, but it’s handled well, and adds a bit of perspective to things that get hinted at in other books.

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Throne of Jade

by on December 17, 2022 at 12:00 pm
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The first Temeraire book had one big question that was never answered. China had sent a dragon egg to Napoleon. The reason why highly isolationist China should do this was wondered at a couple times in the first novel, but no answer was forthcoming.

So, this second book in the series is aimed directly at that question, which had become even more befuddling as Temeraire’s true worth becomes apparent at the end of His Majesty’s Dragon. This central plot thread gets going immediately as a Chinese delegation arrives demanding Temeraire’s return. The British government, already with its hands full in Europe is not minded to outright refuse, even if all the primary characters are.

The plot structure suffers a bit as this central plot thread stretches out with no idea of how it could resolve for far too long. Much of the middle is more concerned about the process of getting halfway around the world in the early Nineteenth Century, which keeps the action going, but doesn’t do a lot for the central plot. And once the journey itself is largely over, the next stand-in taking look at a different culture, and how it treats dragons; a comparison that is deeply disconcerting to Laurence as he realizes how short Europe comes in this department. I would assume this will fuel at least some sub-plots in later books.

Reactions to this book will all hinge on how you do with a central plot that seems stuck in amber most of the time. The answer to that initial question, when it comes, makes sense, and makes for a good plot twist, but the ending itself is still abrupt and feels a little forced, though it does flow directly from what has been learned. Overall, it’s a good sequel novel that avoids trying to do the exact same thing twice in a row. This shuffles the Napoleonic Wars offstage; we hear about the Battle of Austerlitz, and that’s about it. I hope we get to see a bit more later on.

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With Eagles To Glory

by on December 9, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

All right, I wouldn’t have ever thought of a book on Napoleon’s German allies on my own, but this is a very good, if limited look at just that. This is a look at just the 1809 Danubian campaign. There’s a bit about the founding of the Confederation of the Rhine, and the 1808 events that lead into this campaign. And that’s it. There was continued fighting in 1809 in Spain, and a fair number of German troops were sent there before more had to be raised for the Danubian campaign. While that fact is discussed, that’s all that’s said except for some very passing mentions of how some of those contingents did in comparison with the with their brethren in this book.

Now, within that set of constraints, this is a very good book. The amount of detail is understandably high, even if the maps are at best lackluster, and often don’t back up the text well. There are two major sections, one of which mostly looks at the primary campaign, and the other goes into several subsidiary theaters, most notably an insurrection in the Tyrol and Vorarlberg. Bavaria gets (deservedly) a full, long chapter, with Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Saxony also getting their own chapters.

Because he goes through each country in turn, the narrative of events is split up and gets a bit jumbled. But that’s not the purpose of this book; if you want a look at the campaign as a whole, look elsewhere (quite likely at Gill’s Thunder on the Danube series). You do get a look at the units themselves along with tables of organization for the units involved, and figures for the numbers of men.

For me, the most important part of this volume is the war in Tyrol. It is prominent in the Bavaria chapter, and also is the lead chapter in the second part. I hadn’t known anything about major insurrections during this campaign, and this one nearly overwhelmed the nearby German states. Since it was almost entirely left to German troops, it gets a full discussion here. The rest of the second part is about smaller events, winding down to some raids staged to get uprisings going in the rest of Germany, which did not happen, but the military security arrangements against these are gone into.

Overall, this is a well done book on a bit of a niche subject, but one that is more interesting than it would first seem. Unfortunately there are a few major flubs in the electronic version of the book. Mostly, it is in very good shape, but a large chunk of chapter 7 is missing, leaving you wondering exactly what just happened, with everything wrapping up right after a tense part of the campaign… and there’s eleven pages stuck after the chapter endnotes. (More signs that something went seriously wrong in there is a missing name, “an attack on ’s defences“.)

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