Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerGrainger finds a way to focus in on some of the details of the early Hellenistic period by concentrating on the shortest-lived dynasty of the Successors, while arguing for its pivotal position in the period. I think he stretches the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a good look at the Revolutionary War in 1781 in a popular history style. It is marred by a click-bait title, and a blurb that really tries to oversell the subject (not in importance, but calling Yorktown ‘overlooked’[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This one… is a bit of an odd duck. It’s generally an alternate-history story featuring J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the same time, it’s more of a fictionalized biography of him, especially as the alternate part of history is largely minimized.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Alan Taylor admits straight-up in the introduction that he took a very expansive view of the subject of the first volume of Penguin’s History of the United States series. Geographically, he looks at all of North America, rather than just[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a close look at about fifteen years that changed much of the structures of Europe in a popular history format. In a way, it is “Here I Stand the book”, though it only covers a fraction of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
With any good story, it can be hard to manage to make the things that made it work function just as well again. That is, “sequelitis”. With a fresh start, you can do something different, but with a sequel, you’re[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is part one of a massive four-volume history of the Hundred Years War. As such, it spends a good amount of time setting the stage, and covers through Crecy and the siege of Callais. The first chapter is an[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve enjoyed Honsinger’s Man of War series as a fairly typical energetic military-SF series borrowing from the Age of Sail literary series. My main disappointment with the series is that it halts at a dramatic moment, and the sequel series[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As ever, Osprey has produced another good book looking outside of the usual Anglophone center of western Europe. The general focus in this volume is the Russian response to the Mongol conquest. There’s the usual pair of decent maps showing[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Long ago, my Dad recommended the novel Sword at Sunset to me. Before I ever got around to it, I found out that it was part of a series of novels Rosemary Sutcliff wrote about Roman and post-Roman Britain. So,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…