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 BootsPart of the Norton History of Modern Europe series, this is a good introductory history of a fairly turbulent period written in 1970. I’ll note that the series was apparently reorganized later, as there is a 1979 version of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Roger Crowley tackles the sixteenth-century clash between East and West in the Mediterranean as a grand epic story in this book. Over fifty years of history is his canvas for a tale of peoples and cultures, which he does a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Braudel’s massive scholarly treatment of the Mediterranean from 1550 to 1600 is in three parts split between two volumes. However, even with part two being split between volumes, there is a change in direction at the volume break. Part two[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Quite some time ago, there was a photo on BGG of a bookshelf with the poster’s references for a game on the Battle of Lepanto (I have no idea how the game is coming along), and Braudel’s two volume work[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I picked up The Pacific Ocean a while ago at a library sale. It’s a history of the exploration of the Pacific Ocean written in 1940. It was the first of the “Oceans of the World” series, all written by[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
After reading Norwich’s book on Venice, I looked at his other books, and saw one on the Mediterranean that looked interesting. However, most of the reviews for it said it was okay, but Abulafia’s The Great Sea was much better,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As of about AD 200, the Roman Empire was by far the most powerful state within its known world, and had been for over two hundred years. Three hundred years later, the western half of the Empire had ceased to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Roger 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…