Maria Theresa

by on February 14, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Kudos to Bloomsbury for making worthwhile older books available in e-format with good editing. No kudos for spending zero effort on the cover, but… the text’s the thing anyway.

Crankshaw’s biography of Empress Maria Theresa is certainly well done, within certain limits. He’s not afraid to be quite opinionated, which I generally find a good thing for a non-technical biography, as long as you get a good idea of what the opinions are. It’s obvious that he admires Maria Theresa, and there is certainly a lot to admire about anyone who can survive the attempted dismemberment of her inheritance as she took the throne. More surprising was his low opinion of Catherine the Great.

At any rate, this is not a ‘technical’ history by any means, and there’s only general descriptions of what happened, that tend to go through one subject at a time. Without prior knowledge of the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, those sections may be difficult to follow. But of course, he’s only concerned about their effects on Maria Theresa and Austria as a whole, and his discussion of the diplomacy that ended up touching off the Seven Years War is interesting.

There is discussion of her inner circle, which is the most developed and most interesting part of the book. There’s also a couple chapters on what was going on in the arts (this is, after all, when Vienna starts becoming a cultural center), which was rough going since my Art History knowledge is severely lacking. The two main themes are politics and personal life. There’s talk of the government and reforms that were made, but no real detail. Sadly, while her two prominent children (Joseph II and Marie Antoinette) are discussed at length, but the other eleven children who survived infancy remain near non-entities.

So it’s a decent general book on the period, and a decent biography. I got some things out of it, but I did feel like there wasn’t enough detail to really get an understanding of much of what was going on. There’s generally not enough on Central Europe in English, so I’m still happy I read it.

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The Tethered Mage

by on February 6, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Okay, first off, this was decidedly enjoyable. The main character is intelligent and sympathetic. She’s spent her time following interests away from politics, which has bored her. But, now it’s impinging on things she cares about. There’s rebellion brewing in a city that’s practically a second home for her, and the Raverran Empire could destroy a large chunk of it as an example if it goes too far. Worse, she may be the one ordered to do it (which is a result of the book’s first complication).

That said, there are problems. Even as complications are introduced, it always feels like the politics and intrigue are too simple and straightforward to feel real. Some of this may be intentional, as we’re seeing it through the eyes of someone who’s unused to intrigue. …But I think the author is too (not that I’d do much better).

The strong point of the novel is the number of ‘no good answer’ questions that are presented. People who can use magic are clearly marked (a colored ring appears in the iris), and they are ‘jessed’, with their magic bound, and made wards of the state, and also work at it’s direction, for the more powerful types, often with the military. There’s a fair number objections to this in the book, but considering some magic is likely to run out of control without the binding, and before this system, the common reaction was to kill anyone who was mage-marked… how bad is it really?

A little more mixed is the use of Venice as the prototype of Raverra. It generally feels right, and the rest of the setting (what little we see this time) fits with it, but Raverra has a large land empire, as opposed to the Stato da Mar (okay, so this is more based off Renaissance Venice, while I tend to think of Medieval Venice, but the island trade empire is a lot of what makes Venice interesting to me). At the moment, Vaskandar is a bit one-note, but hopefully that’ll get a bit filled out too.

But the main character is good, the cast around her is believable, and the action is well done. While there are dangling threads for a trilogy, the immediate plot wraps up well, and overall, it’s a very solid fantasy novel, especially for a first novel from the author, and the reviews I’ve seen indicate the quality stays high for the entire trilogy.

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Roman Battle Tactics 300-110 BC

by on January 29, 2019 at 12:00 pm
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Osprey’s battle tactics series continues to be well done overall. This one concentrates a bit more on background, but that doesn’t really interfere with the main parts of the presentation. Despite the title, Fields takes a look at the situation on the Italian peninsula from Rome’s founding ca. 750 BC, and discusses the likely organization (or lack thereof) of fighting in that period.

Unlike other titles in this series, there’s not a lot of battle discussion. There is some, with seven diagrams of pertinent battles, but there’s no sidebar discussion of them in particular, and the mentions in the main text are usually very brief. The worst part of the book is missed opportunities: There are sections titled ‘Phalanx versus war band’ and ‘Legion versus phalanx’, that could have been about how one organization was superior to/defeated the other, but instead lightly touches on the battles mentioned before. Worse, the first one shows a couple of Roman defeats by war bands, and doesn’t go into the actual advantages brought to warfare by adopting such an organized formation.

The heart of the book is of course the manipular legion of the Republic, which is fairly well understood, and I’ve seen explained elsewhere, so this book isn’t all that new for someone who’s read a bit of Roman military history. However, it does nicely bring everything together into one place, and as always with Osprey, does a good job of showing the actual equipment of the period. It also includes a good page or so on the Roman practice of establishing a fortified camp each night on the march, and showing how that worked.

Of the various pre-modern Battle Tactic books, this is the one with information that is easiest to find elsewhere, but it is nicely gathered together, and well illustrated, making it one of the better single references on the subject I’ve seen.

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The Chronicles of Chrestomanci I

by on January 25, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Somehow, I missed Dianna Wynne Jones during my reading heyday in the ’80s. So my first introduction to her was through Hayao Miyazaki. My second introduction was slightly later through a friend who had gotten these collected volumes of the Chrestomanci series. Recently, I found my own used copies. I had already read the first book through Kindle, and planned to just skim it as a reminder before going into the second book, but I ended up re-reading the entire thing instead, which should serve as a recommendation right there.

In this volume, both Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant have a lot of structural similarities.”Chrestomanci” is the name of a government office in an alternate England. He regulates magical access to other worlds, to prevent or at least curtail illegal trade in nasty things like dragon blood and mermaid tails. How exactly this works is not explained, nor what this means for other countries, but it does require someone of great magical power. What happens if the only person available with enough power would be more likely to conduct such trade isn’t mentioned.

But, both books are from the point of view of children (around 10-12), so a lot of that is way outside the scope of the stories here. There is an underlying current of if you have the power, you’re probably also temperamentally the right person for the job, no matter how unlikely it seems at first.

Charmed Life is a fun read from start to finish, but suffers from the usual DWJ habit of the plot just collapsing into a very sudden ending. It’s a bit rushed, and people kind of just show up for it (okay, they were legitimately summoned to the big climax, but they’re more powerful than the limited viewpoint has shown so far). The Lives of Christopher Chant is kind of a re-run of some of the same themes in a prequel, but much better developed. Chris is much more proactive, and has definite goals he tries to pursue, even if some of them turn out to be bad ideas, and the ending flows out of the action in a much more satisfying way.

So, given the first book was good enough to draw me into a re-read, it just gets better from there.

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A Wrinkle in Time

by on January 21, 2019 at 12:00 pm
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A Wrinkle in Time hits several time-honored traditions of the YA novel. Of course, it helped establish some of them. Meg is the outsider at school, she can’t help being a bit different, and can’t find the patience to do things the way others want. Children get to take a central role in saving the world (or at least a world). And there’s the convenient arrive right after you left bit from Narnia.

There is a lack of detail in many places. The description of a tesseract (a four-dimensional object) is confused; there’s a stopover on a two-dimensional world, which would put it out of our universe, but… well. Just how a tesseract can get one across the universe isn’t explained (there are some actual theories that relate to it, but nothing is given in the book), much less how any of this got out of pure mathematics. Going at all deeply into it would bog down the book to no end, but it does make the story feel like it has little foundation, especially as there’s no feeling that the author has it worked out in her head.

There are more serious problems. Meg does not feel like she has a lot of agency in parts of the book. Where she does act is important, but there’s a fair amount of dragging around.

However, the overall story and themes are very good, and carry all these weak points without trouble. Meg’s troubles are reflected in Camazotz where everyone is the same, and everything happens on a precise schedule. (Really, that part is extremely effectively creepy.)

So, yes… the book is worth a recommendation. At the same time, I feel that Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard takes the same starting elements and delivers a much superior story, so I recommend it instead.

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