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…
Posts Tagged review
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…
This one… is a bit of an odd duck. It’s generally an alternate-history story featuring J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the same time, it’s more of a fictionalized biography of him, especially as the alternate part of history is largely minimized.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
