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 GamerBeing something of a fan of warring states Japan (you can largely thank Nobunaga’s Ambition II for that), I’ve been aware for some time that at the end of the era, there was a Japanese invasion of Korea. But not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Everyone knows of the Age of Exploration, and the Portuguese efforts to find a sea-route around Africa to India. If you know a little more history, you know something of their efforts related to controlling trade in India and the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sir Jens’ (‘Sir’ seems to be his first name…) In the Shadow of Empires is an amateur history book about Vlad Dracula (as opposed to a sensational book about the fictional ‘Dracula’). It shows its amateur status in some uneven[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Danielle Jensen’s first novel reads fast, but has quite a bit going on in it. At the start of the story, the main character (Cécile) is kidnapped, and taken to a hidden city of trolls, where she is ‘bonded’ to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Published by Didactic Press, Gardiner’s The Thirty Years War is another cheap ebook of a public-domain work. The normal price seems to be a buck or two, and I think I picked it up for free. In general, this is[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve generally been liking Osprey’s turn towards specialized subjects in their Elite line, and this is no exception. The book takes a look at what is known of Roman sieges from the fall of Carthage to the siege of Cremna[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Prussia weighed heavily on the collective mind of Europe during the 19th and 20th Centuries. My history classes generally blamed the formation of Germany for throwing off the structure of international power in Europe and causing two World Wars. And[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Barbara Hambly is a name I saw a fair amount of when I was haunting SF&F bookshelves as stores as a teenager, but I never got around to trying any of her books. I later found that I indeed had[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The fundamental problem with most of ancient history is that the vast bulk of everyone involved left no records behind. There are bright spots, and sometimes stories that were later written down, but sometimes even those iffy sources are missing.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve long been interested in the ancient world. The Roman Empire, especially, gets a lot of my historical interest. In my reading, it’s very easy to find books on Rome (Empire and Republic), and on Alexander. The period right after[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…