Inside GMT Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerPoul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest starts out with a fairly straight telling of the Battle of Marston Moor. There is a difference: Prince Rupert of the Rhine is captured at the end of the action. And then, the second chapter[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The “Pike and Shot” period that marks post-medieval warfare is one that I’ve never known a lot about, and so Osprey’s Elite book on the subject looked like just the thing. It actually deals with a just a portion of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s book on Byzantine infantry covers from around the reign of Emperor Leo VI, which saw a revival of interest in military matters, to the fall of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, which interrupted tradition, and very effectively brought the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
David Potter’s book on Constantine is at first a little hard to pin down. It’s not really a biography, and despite the title, only about half the book is about the reign of Emperor Constantine, with the first half being[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I was expecting something of a detailed look at the Greek myths of Amazons with modern archaeology put in to start telling us just how much of it might have been true. Instead, this is a bit more wide-ranging, largely[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s Fortress book on ancient Troy is not a bad guide to the history of the site as known to archaeology as a whole, but the bulk of the book concentrates (understandably) on Troy VIh, which is one of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s hard to figure out where I should start with this book, because there’s a lot of places where I could start. The Name of the Rose is set in 1327, and the struggles of the Christian church in northern[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Robert K. Massie’s volume is a massive biography that delivers a good look at its subject. “His Life” is covered in ~850 pages covering from his childhood and the later parts of the reign of his father, Czar Alexis, and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Helen Castor describes the story of Joan of Arc as normally being written backwards. Everything is colored by the knowledge of what she would become to history. Also, the histories pour over the transcripts of her trials looking for clues[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
A friend who has been the source of a number of good recommendations over the years recommended Sing the Four Quarters back when it came out. It always stuck in my mind, and I’ve meant to get to it for…[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…