Swords Around a Throne

by on August 11, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Elting’s history of the Grand Armee of Napoleonic France is justly well regarded. It’s a massive tome that dives into just about every aspect of one of the most successful armies of military history. The main problem is that it isn’t really a history. The beginning talks about the French Royal Army before the Revolution and what got carried forward, the end talks about what came afterward, but the rest is a muddle, as far as chronology goes, going back and forth on whims over a span of well over a decade in which things changed drastically.

This is of course so various topics can be examined in quite a lot of depth, and all the things that go into an organization as complex as a large field army can be looked at. Even within a subject, this discussion free-flowing and by subtopic, but the book is wide ranging and thorough enough that you could start with the easy mechanical parts of the Grand Armee at any point in time, and use this book to build outwards and get a sense of all the things (logistics, supply, replacements and reserves, etc) that are a part of it.

An interesting point about the book is that Elting is American, and makes no bones about it. At one point in his description of the Revolution he pauses and says, ‘okay, here’s what this is all about, because there’s no parallel to these events in American political history.’ He makes a number other references to his background, but that is by far the most germane, though there’s some good ones comparing his first-hand experience of military matters to Napoleon’s campaigns.

Overall, the book lives up to its good reputation, and is worth a read for anyone interested in Napoleonic military history. The wide variety of subjects handled means that any non-specialist will get something new out of it, and possibly a good number of specialists, which is a pretty good feat for a general market work.

The bad news is that the Da Capo Kindle version is in desperate need of post-OCR cleanup. Like with many such, it starts okay, but slowly goes downhill the further through the book you get. In this case, much of the book has one or more noticeable errors per page, which is one of the worst rates of errors I’ve seen. Obviously the cleanup effort was especially perfunctory in this case, which is a real shame in a book this important.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

The Years of Victory

by on July 26, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This second volume of Bryant’s series on the Napoleonic era was published in 1945 (commonly given as 1944, but he mentions “the events of 1939-1945” in his preface), and he has no qualms about drawing a parallel to Britain’s experience in WWII with its experience of the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike some who would bring up something like this several times over the course of the book, Bryant merely mentions it in his preface, and lets the history he writes stand on its own.

Having left off with the Peace of Amiens in The Years of Endurance, this volume starts with a look at England in 1802, and all the tourism to France that happened in the months of peace. This is an English-centric history, so while it does cover the various wars on the continent for a decade, it is largely concerned with what England was doing. The end of the book is naturally concerned with the Peninsular War, and ends with the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo.

Once again, this is well written, and the translation from print to electronic format in the Endeavour Press edition left it in pretty good shape. It’s a good book to read as part of a more rounded set of lighter books on the period, as it does leave out a lot with its English focus.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

The Tea Master and the Detective

by on July 18, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This Aliette de Bodard story is every bit as good as the first one I read a while ago. In fact, I felt it was more tightly plotted, and shorter, than On a Red Station, Drifting, but it seems that book was only slightly longer than this.

At any rate, they share a setting, and at some point I will revisit it again, as the stories are well worth reading. I’d say this one could be slightly harder to get into than On a Red Station with no introduction, thanks to the viewpoint character being a ship’s intelligence stuck at a collection of habitats.

However, there is a nice melding of genres here, as a very SF setup quickly turns into a mystery with hard-boiled overtones. The Shadow’s Child is on the thin edge of bankruptcy when a new client walks through her door, and the assignment ends up generating new questions. The initial bit sets up the two characters well, but was a little difficult to get through for me. After that, the plot drives itself, and drags you along in the wake of two interesting characters.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

Nelson and the Nile

by on June 28, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I picked up this book for cheap some time ago, and I’m quite happy to have finally gotten to it. This is definitely on the “layman’s” side of military history, but he does a very good job with it.

The background and aftermath make up fairly significant portions of the book, and serve the purpose well. Especially nice is the chapter where he goes into the construction and outfitting of HMS Vanguard (Nelson’s flagship at the Nile). This lets him talk about ship designs of the period, the “74”s (which the Vanguard was), and what went into outfitting a complete ship at the time. Its mostly things I’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s well-presented here, and a worthy diversion.

The central part of the book of course is about Nelson’s chase back-and-forth across the Mediterranean, reconstructing not only the lines across the map that the French and British fleets took, but the missed opportunities, the gaps in information that crippled Nelson’s initial attempts to find the French fleet before it got to Egypt.

One of Lavery’s main ideas is that the Battle of the Nile was the central hinge of the the wars of the period, and was more important than Trafalgar, which does have better heroic trappings. He makes a good case for this, but not an especially great case, and much of the extended aftermath portion where he tries to drive this idea home drags a bit. The immediate aftermath, with the victorious British fleet still greatly damaged and working its way back to friendly bases to spread the news is however, still very interesting, and a part you don’t get to see as often.

└ Tags: , , ,
1 Comment

Alliance Rising

by on June 20, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

C. J. Cherryh’s writing can get annoying with pages and pages of internal… well, monologue is not quite the right term, but it’s close. Major character’s thoughts are examined in detail as they go around on subjects weighing every angle. In general, very few people ever consciously think like this; it’s more an attempt to distill the conscious and unconscious factors that make a person act they way they do. It’s effective in its own way, but can be drawn out and heavy handed.

I had hoped that Fancher’s influence might tone this and a couple other elements down, but no. In fact, instead of this process being applied to one or two characters, we’re up to… three? four? here. And this means this is a more complex novel than most of Cherryh’s (and I’m not sure she’s ever written a simple one). Nonetheless, it was well worth the trip.

Downbelow Station, and a few other places, give the general outline of humanity’s expansion into the stars, first by slow-boat, and then FTL. Over time, Cherryh has been slowly exploring more of the backstory, and this book is set earlier than all the others. There’s a three-way tug of war of influence and trade, with Earth trapped behind the tyranny of distance: FTL drives won’t reach all the way from Sol to the nearest station established in STL era. Someday, Earth, with the resources of billions of people, will be set loose on the network of stations out there, but not yet….

In fact, closest stations to Earth are now something of a blind alley trade-wise. Only barely relevant, with the bigger stations further out there happy with that situation. But of course, it can’t last. Everyone knows it won’t last. No one knows when it will change.

The novel doesn’t end where I would have thought, but is well structured throughout. Better yet, as things get going from a slow-burn beginning, the story picks up a more human, personal side that I think much of Cherryh’s work lacks. This is a good intro to her long-standing Union-Alliance series, and easily one of the best of the set.

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment