Helen Castor describes the story of Joan of Arc as normally being written backwards. Everything is colored by the knowledge of what she would become to history. Also, the histories pour over the transcripts of her trials looking for clues[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posts Tagged books
A friend who has been the source of a number of good recommendations over the years recommended Sing the Four Quarters back when it came out. It always stuck in my mind, and I’ve meant to get to it for…[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I picked up Peter Heather’s 2009 book simply because it was cheap on Kindle at one point. I’m now thinking I want to get a proper hard copy book. This is mostly a measure of how much I liked the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Deep Secret begins with a cryptic message that the following was secretly deposited in the archive at Iforion. I’d pretty much forgotten that by the time reference was made to it late in the book. There’s a number of things[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Elizabeth Moon’s Legacy of Gird is a pair of prequel novels to her Deed of Paksenarrion series. They’re something of an odd pair: the two books have some significant overlap in time, and while the first one is easy to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
You could easily write a recursive book about the influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History upon history. Mahan wanted to show that navies decided wars, even between land powers, and many powerful and influential people listened. In[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is part two of two of Hogarth’s Godkindred Saga, and I wish I’d leafed through the first book again before reading it like I had planned. This is so tied to the first book that after a short prologue[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Ottoman Empire lasted a shade over six centuries, and Lord Kinross covers its history in a bit over 600 pages. 600 quite good pages, with a fair number of full-page images (mostly period portraits or landscapes) and a small[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Being something of a fan of warring states Japan (you can largely thank Nobunaga’s Ambition II for that), I’ve been aware for some time that at the end of the era, there was a Japanese invasion of Korea. But not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Everyone knows of the Age of Exploration, and the Portuguese efforts to find a sea-route around Africa to India. If you know a little more history, you know something of their efforts related to controlling trade in India and the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…