Inside GMT 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 Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerRoger Collins is a name I’ve known for many years through his Early Medieval Europe 300–1000, so when I realized that a book I was considering getting was by him, it became an instant first choice. Covering nearly 2000 years[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Harold Lamb wrote a bunch of very readable and enjoyable historical biographies from the 1920s to ’60s, but is sadly not very well known today. He was an exemplar of a narrative style of popular history writing that seems to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Part two of Osprey’s survey of European Medieval Tactics is much like the first volume. Unfortunately, while I felt the first volume started strong and finished somewhat weaker, all of this volume is at the level of the later portions[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As usual, Osprey’s Campaign series does an excellent job of presenting the background and people involved in the battle in question. In this case, the later stages of the Wars of the Roses, and Richard III’s reign are covered very[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s title on the Wars of the Roses is typical of their Man-at-Arms line. Half the book is a good simple history of the period, and a fairly solid introduction to it. There’s no details, no sense of the people,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I just finished reading this early Osprey book, and while it’s well done, I don’t think I can recommend it. It covers the Battle of Agincourt, and the campaign that led up to it, quite well, but Osprey’s later Campaign[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Margaret Aston’s The Fifteenth Century is the second book I’ve read from the Library of World Civilization series, which seems to be pretty good in all. The books come with a large number of illustrations well placed with the text[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In the introduction of Stephen Turnbull’s The Lone Samurai and the Martial Arts, he points out, “the figure of the lone samurai, whose popularity is never in doubt throughout history, stands in direct contrast to what are perceived as the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Just finished reading Stephen Turnbull’s Battles of the Samurai today. While it is exactly what the title implies, a study of nine battles from Japanese history (ranging from Kurikara in 1183 to Sekigahara in 1600), it is also a good[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve been interested in the Merovingian period of (proto-)France for some time. So I was very happy when I finally got Ian Wood’s The Merovingian Kingdoms for my birthday. It’s not a great book. Though I’d say for the period[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…