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 end of the Western Roman Empire is a hard subject to get a real grasp on. Ian Huges’ book about one of the final magister militums of the western empire does a lot to explain conditions during the beginning[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger seems at first that it should be an action-adventure tale like the Vorkosigan series or maybe Honor Harrington. The opening of the book is the main character getting tossed out of the military academy for[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s Campaign book on the Battle of Manzikert continues their proud tradition of featuring just about every military disaster Rome had. (Well, yes, we are just a bit ‘post-Rome’ here, though it’s still the Roman Empire.) As usual, it’s a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Adrian Goldworthy’s In the Name of Rome is something of a mixed bag. It purports itself as being an examination of the Roman style of command by looking at several of its most prominent generals. The selection is constrained to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Historical, fantasy, or romance…? The Golem and the Jinni is a bit of a mix of all three. The Manhattan of 1899 is almost as much a character as anything else in this novel, but it doesn’t feel like a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In 91 BC, the Roman Republic found itself fighting a not-quite civil war, when a large part of Rome’s allies and conquered peoples in Italy rebelled and tried to bring down the Roman Republic. Cataclysm 90 BC is about this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
One of my interests for some time has been getting a better idea of just what happened after Alexander the Great’s death. Often that time period ends up ignored or summarized until Rome comes on the scene. So a book[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
“T. Kingfisher” is a pseudonym for Ursula Vernon’s more ‘grown up’ books, but The Seventh Bride is really more Young Adult in my eyes. Certainly, the level of writing is still in that area (that’s not bad, the book just[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Adrienne Mayor starts with, intelligently, expanding the normal contemporary definition of ‘chemical and biological’ weapons to include pretty much anything that causes biological harm, such as poisons, noxious chemicals, and beyond, to the use of animals, heated sand, and other[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Barbara Tuchman was a journalist before becoming a history author, and despite The March of Folly being a book about certain historical incidents, it is more a work of journalism than history. It is an investigation into the process by[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…