Queen of the Conqueror

by on September 7, 2014 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Tracy Borman’s book about Queen Matilda (William the Conqueror’s wife, if you’re not keeping score at home) does a very good job with tracing the live of a medieval woman (much better than Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitane, but it is also only 3/4s the length of that book), but manages to be irritating on a regular basis.

The introduction of the book gives a commonly told story of Matilda, upon hearing that she was to be betrothed to Duke William “the Bastard” of Normandy, rejecting the idea that she (related to the King of France) would never stoop so low as to marry a bastard. William, hearing this, rides to her family’s palace in Flanders and finding Matilda beats her mercilessly. Matilda then decides that she would marry no one else as he was a man of high courage and daring. When Borman gets to this part of Matilda’s life in the narrative, she repeats the story, and then starts casting doubts on the story, pointing out that it is first mentioned about two hundred years after the fact, and that one of the primary sources for it has a strong anti-Norman bias. The section ends with a conclusion that we just don’t have any clear picture of what, if anything, happened between the two before they were married.

This pattern is followed in many parts of the book. Tales are given with a straight face, and only afterward are problems or alternate versions talked about. Worse, are the cases where something is mentioned as being from ‘a nineteenth century chronicler’ with no discussion as to where he got it from, or why we should think he knew anything about it. After the number of other unsubstantiated stories that are discussed, it raises alarms.

But despite these problems, it is a good book about Matilda. It is not as comprehensive, or detailed as, again, Allison Weir’s Eleanor of Aquitane, but that book failed at being the biography it was supposed to be, while this one is a good biography that gives a much clearer picture of its subject.

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Kawanakajima 1553–64

by on September 6, 2014 at 11:25 am
Posted In: Books

The Five Battles of Kawanakajima are not that well known in the West, but they are one of the most celebrated incidents of the Warring States period in Japan (right behind those parts that are better known in the West, such as Nobunaga’s career and the Battle of Nagashino that forms the climax of Ran).

Turnbull starts with the most basic rundown of the situation, including the fact that while all the battles occurred near the plain of Kawanakajima, most of them could properly be termed something else entirely, and that you could count eight battles of Kawanakajima, by including three more that fit the pattern of the other five. But, most Japanese histories consider the same five battles between Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin as ‘the battles of Kawanakajima’, and this book focuses on them, and especially the Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima as the main confrontation.

As usual with Osprey’s Campaign series, the background and events are well presented, with plenty of clear maps that show what was happening. Turnbull’s analysis is good, and only occasionally breaks down under the weight of the number of different things to keep track of. A very good book for anyone who has an interest in Japanese military history.

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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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History of Germany in the Middle Ages

by on April 24, 2014 at 8:07 pm
Posted In: Books

This is another cheap Kindle version of a public domain book, this time offered by The Pergamum Collection (I got it for free some time ago). Originally written in 1894 as the first volume of an English guide to German history, it covers from Roman times to the end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the mid-13th century.

While the difference in publishers is evident in the fact that the nature of OCR-related problems is different, the fact is that they are present, and show that no real proofing of the document was done. From several occurrences of “Charles the Pat” before finally showing up properly as “Charles the Fat” the last time he is named, to “Emperor Frederick II.,” showing up as “Emperor Frederick IL,” in the introduction, the book has a large collection of minor problems that would have been fixed with a pair of attentive eyes. Overall, though, the incidence of problems is probably less than the average for Lecturable, so I marginally recommend Pergamum over them.

The book itself is quite good. It is of course dated, and mostly concerned with the affairs of kings and rebellions (not a problem to me), though it does have chapters on society and literature at the end, and is written with a great deal of enthusiasm for the subject. I’ve long wanted some sort of answers as to how the post-Carolingian Kingdom of the East Franks turned into the disunited Holy Roman Empire of the Renaissance, and this book does talk about the beginning of the process, with the rise of cities and local leagues, as the administration of the Empire comes apart in the face of a Papacy determined to keep the Hohenstaufens from uniting Italy around the Papal territories.

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The Fourth Part of the World

by on January 22, 2014 at 6:59 pm
Posted In: Books, History

In 1507, new world maps were something of a booming business. The Portuguese had been discovering more about Africa for decades, the Spanish had recently found a number of islands, and a larger landmass across the Atlantic, and the English had found a long shoreline to the west of Greenland.

Since Asia was mostly known to be a northerly continent, that last was still presumed to be part of Asia, but the Spanish mainland, in the tropics, was starting to look like something else again. In 1507 a new map was published, designed to put together all the pieces of the world, as they were becoming known. It was a large map, meant to be mounted and used as huge wall map, and it marked the southern landmass “America”, after Amerigo Vespucci, who was known to have visited the landmass a year before Columbus did on his third voyage by a letter written by him that was being reprinted across Europe.

The map, made to be used, largely disappeared, and it was only in the nineteenth century that its existence as the first use of the word “America” for the New World was discovered. Toby Lester’s book is about this map—and everything else that led to it. This begins with medieval mappaemundi, and works its way through Marco Polo, the Italian and German humanists, and the dawn of the Age of Exploration.

It’s a very entertaining and informative book all the way, and gives a good overview of the careers of Columbus and Vespucchi, and explains the letter that has caused much gnashing of teeth over the centuries, and kept Columbus from being a major cartographical feature, even if it did not keep him out of the history books.

It is most likely not written by Vespucci at all. It takes pieces of two of his letters, some details from one of Columbus’ reports, adds sex and cannibals, and did a brisk business for local printing presses across the continent. It’s kind of a early-sixteenth century equivalent to the DaVinci Code.

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