Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerI’ve generally been liking Osprey’s turn towards specialized subjects in their Elite line, and this is no exception. The book takes a look at what is known of Roman sieges from the fall of Carthage to the siege of Cremna[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Prussia weighed heavily on the collective mind of Europe during the 19th and 20th Centuries. My history classes generally blamed the formation of Germany for throwing off the structure of international power in Europe and causing two World Wars. And[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Barbara Hambly is a name I saw a fair amount of when I was haunting SF&F bookshelves as stores as a teenager, but I never got around to trying any of her books. I later found that I indeed had[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The fundamental problem with most of ancient history is that the vast bulk of everyone involved left no records behind. There are bright spots, and sometimes stories that were later written down, but sometimes even those iffy sources are missing.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve long been interested in the ancient world. The Roman Empire, especially, gets a lot of my historical interest. In my reading, it’s very easy to find books on Rome (Empire and Republic), and on Alexander. The period right after[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Well, this was a little different. There’s a set of introductions to the book that, between them, take up well over 50 pages. The main one (by the author) gives a short history of clan MacGregor, and explains the long-term[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Wars of the Roses is the second book by Alison Weir I’ve read, and it definitely tells me there’s no need to stop here. The writing is good, and gives a great overview of what is a legendarily confusing[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I was expecting Strauss’ The Trojan War: A New History to be a scholarly study of every detail we have about the Trojan world; basically an updated version of In Search of the Trojan War. Instead, it is a more scholarly[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…