Inside GMT Flash of Steel 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 Grumble Jones Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsBarbara 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…
The second half of Jeff Champion’s history of Syracuse picks up right where the the first left off: The death of Dionysius the Elder and the ascension of his son, Dionysius the Younger as Tyrant of Syracuse. He uses this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
To a certain extent, I’ve always wondered why Guns, Germs, and Steel caused such a huge splash. The main premise boils down to ‘differences in geography cause differences in societies and their history’, which belongs to the club of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Basques is by an author who has impressed me in the past, and was also a chance to look at The Peoples of Europe series. The book (and presumably others in the series) is a little under 300 pages[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It often seems to me like Sicily doesn’t get a lot of attention, now or in the ancient world, even though it’s a very prominent land-mass that dominates the middle of the Mediterranean. This is more an accident of our[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
If you study the history of the Middle Ages, it doesn’t take long to realize the Normans were involved in a lot more than England and northern France. However, while I’d become aware of the Norman state in southern Italy,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Barry Strauss has written a very accessible account of the second time the Greeks fought off the Persian Empire. He spends a good amount of time on the background: the Ionian revolt, the general configuration of the Persian court, etc.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Charles Spenser is certainly correct in his assertion that the Battle of Blenheim is one of the more important battles of history that is not well remembered today. This is more surprising in the English-speaking world since it was an[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Douglas Porch’s book on imperialism and warfare is meant as an introductory book on the subject, but I don’t think it serves that job very well. Organized around general subjects of how European vs non-European wars worked in the 18th[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In 2009 a highly unusual map was found in the Bodlean Library archives. Unusual enough that it might have been considered a fake, if not for the fact that the records of the Library receiving the map in 1659 still[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…