Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerBy the description, this is a through examination of one particular speech Abraham Lincoln gave at the start of his second career in politics. That’s actually a very incomplete description. This book is much more about all the history surrounding[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Despite the title, this isn’t focused on Radetzky. (But it is a great take off of Johann Strauss’ celebration of the campaign.) At the start of 1848, revolution swept through Paris—again. And this time, much of the rest of Europe[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Stephen Douglas was a very able speaker and politician on what turned out to be the losing side of history, is mostly remembered for being Abraham Lincoln’s foil (or more properly, the other way around). Enough so, that basic history[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I picked this book up mostly for the reproductions of a series of sketches of the California Missions. In 1856 they were already largely abandoned, and would soon decay into a ruined state (and by the text, this had already[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is an expansive history of about sixty years, across a fair amount of space. It’s also a fairly limited history, largely confined to what “white people” were doing. This is, in large part, man-vs-nature history, with strange people coming[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The main problem with study of the Mexican-American War is that it is severely overshadowed by the later Civil War. Instead of struggling against the problem, this book embraces it, tracing the careers of several prominent ACW generals through this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Okay, lets start by setting expectations: The advertising blurb mentions ‘the life of Archimedes’, suggesting a big, dense, fictional biography via novel. No, this is a tight fairly plot-focused lighter novel taking place over maybe a single year (probably not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This book gave me a bad impression early on when the introduction states, “All the land taken from Mexico, historians now acknowledge, could have been acquired peacefully through diplomacy and deliberate negotiation of financial recompense.” That’s a rather big pill[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This book is two things in one. First, it is an art book showcasing Graham Turner’s art on the Wars of the Roses. Second, it is a light history of those wars, illustrated with Turner’s paintings, and a number of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Written about two decades before starting his epic five-volume history of the Hundred Years War, Sumption’s history of the fall of southern France follows along the same general lines. In this case, the second chapter goes into a general long-term[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…