Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerIn concept, this is a great book: A look into the personalities and politics of roughly the first decade of the United States, as the men who would become known as the Founding Fathers struggle to turn the new nation[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is an interesting companion to Zamoyski’s Holy Madness. That book looked at all the leftover idealists of post-Napoleonic era revolutions, their passions, and their repeated attempts at change through coercive rebellion. This book is about governmental paranoia from the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Okay, first off, if you can’t tell by the cover, this is a horse book. Which is perfectly fine, and has a great literary tradition, though I never went through a horse phase. (Being a guy might have something to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Bowen’s history of the Constitutional Convention is a great read, and makes what at the time would have been endless debates nicely accessible. It breaks into two nearly even parts, where the first is a fairly chronological account of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second volume of Osprey’s survey of Roman Centurions is a bit better than the first. Most likely, there’s just more source material to draw from. There is less of the individual career profiles, so if you thought that was[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ian Hughes’ books on the period where the Western Empire dissolved into nothingness have been very good at providing a clearer picture of the process. I think this volume might be the best one of the lot. Like his earlier[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Tea With the Black Dragon had crime/mystery as part of its central thread, and in this sequel, it’s basically the main plot in classic ’80s fashion, with a murder, no clear sense of who could have done it, plenty of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second Tomoe Goezen book is in the same format as the first: Four nearly independent novellas under one cover, with no more than scene breaks within them. Like last time, they are different stories, with different tones, but there[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Grainger 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…