Inside GMT Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerThe second volume of Shannon Appelcline’s history of the RPG industry is every bit as large as the first. It’s a much bigger subject though, since the 1980s saw a lot of activity up and down. But TSR and GDW[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The title of Palmer’s book is generally familiar, and he acknowledges directly that he’s writing a similar book to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the introduction. However, this is a ’90s book for a more casual audience,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Shannon Appelcline’s Designer’s & Dragons is a truly massive undertaking: A history of the entire roleplaying game industry from its beginnings to about 2010. Just the first volume, covering six years (1974–79), is 400 pages. However, the structure is such[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Crowley’s book on the fall of Constantinople doesn’t disappoint. He leads off by giving a good overview of the rise of Islam, and various failed sieges of the city over the centuries, showing how it became something of a recurring[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s an act of hubris to be able to pronounce the ‘greatest’ anything, much less the ‘greatest’ knight, a class of people that was fairly large and existed over centuries, but it is certainly fair to say that William Marshal[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Medieval Spain is one of those subjects I would like to know more about, so a used copy of Menocal’s book on al-Andalus was an attractive purchase for me. It’s a little more limited than I would like, being more[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
William Manchester’s book is really an ode to his hero, Magellan. He’s not a bad hero to have, but I think Manchester gives him far too much credit. The real value however, is that Manchester is far more interested in[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Alexandria is one of the great success stories of the ancient world, being founded by Alexander the Great, and then spending the next several centuries as one of the great trading ports of the Mediterranean, as well as a center[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
MacCulloch’s book on the Protestant Reformation is a huge work on a huge subject. Everything you might expect is in here, and much, much, more. He starts with a fairly good overview of western Christianity at the end of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Adam Zomoyski starts his book by noting that there’s no truly adequate biography of King Stanisław II Poniatowski in any language, and his doesn’t measure up either. He figures Stanisław deserves two fairly large volumes to trace down every tangent[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…