Flash of Steel Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Sitrep Hex and Violence Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsThe second book of Vatta’s War finally gets to the ‘war’. Things take a very violent turn at the start, and everything follows on for that. We get a little bit of the opposing viewpoint near the beginning, but nothing[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The French and Indian War gets enough attention that I wasn’t sure I was in need of a book just on that part of the Seven Years War. Boy, was I wrong. Narratively, the focus is around events over several[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This has been on my to-read/to-get list long enough that I don’t remember just how it got there. Certainly in the period when I was looking a lot more at early Europe. It isn’t quite the book I’d been expecting,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
On one hand, this somewhat typical fare: Moon is the ultimate outsider; his family killed while he was young, and his entire life has been spent bouncing from settlement to settlement trying, and failing to fit in. After having given[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is among the very best epic fantasy stories out there. I wouldn’t have ever thought there’d be a sequel, but now that there is, a two-hundred page follow-on to the original does seem like a sensible[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Frederick II of Prussia is considered one of the great generals of history (which is why we usually just call him ‘Frederick the Great’), so a book looking at his military achievements is an excellent subject. Of course, it’s not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s been… wow, a decade? Since I read Master and Commander. So, yes, I can say that you don’t need any detailed knowledge of the first book before reading this. In fact, while the climax of the first book gets[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s an odd enough title for a book, but it certainly fits. It’s apparently based on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen (I’m completely unknowledgeable about that), though my thoughts ran to Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow, which is[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 must rank as the most famous volcanic eruption in all of history, even over such titanic eruptions as Krakatoa, or such well-covered events as Mt. Saint Hellens. Of course, Vesuvius got extensive coverage[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Eighteenth Century saw a series of wars in Europe, that led up to the more famous ones towards the end of that century. I’ve been wanting good books on all of these for some time. I’m still looking for[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…