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 BootsWilliam Doyle is one of the leading English-language experts on the French Revolution, and his book from Oxford University Press is what you’d expect: A concise, clear overview of about three decades in France, concentrating on 1788 through 1799. Having[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
One of the quotes from the back of my second edition copy is “…if you believe in drowning freshmen in significant works, then by all means drown them in this one.” Which is pretty much how I got it, as[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In concept, this is a great book: A look into the personalities and politics of roughly the first decade of the United States, as the men who would become known as the Founding Fathers struggle to turn the new nation[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is an interesting companion to Zamoyski’s Holy Madness. That book looked at all the leftover idealists of post-Napoleonic era revolutions, their passions, and their repeated attempts at change through coercive rebellion. This book is about governmental paranoia from the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Bowen’s history of the Constitutional Convention is a great read, and makes what at the time would have been endless debates nicely accessible. It breaks into two nearly even parts, where the first is a fairly chronological account of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second volume of Osprey’s survey of Roman Centurions is a bit better than the first. Most likely, there’s just more source material to draw from. There is less of the individual career profiles, so if you thought that was[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ian Hughes’ books on the period where the Western Empire dissolved into nothingness have been very good at providing a clearer picture of the process. I think this volume might be the best one of the lot. Like his earlier[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Grainger finds a way to focus in on some of the details of the early Hellenistic period by concentrating on the shortest-lived dynasty of the Successors, while arguing for its pivotal position in the period. I think he stretches the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a good look at the Revolutionary War in 1781 in a popular history style. It is marred by a click-bait title, and a blurb that really tries to oversell the subject (not in importance, but calling Yorktown ‘overlooked’[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Alan Taylor admits straight-up in the introduction that he took a very expansive view of the subject of the first volume of Penguin’s History of the United States series. Geographically, he looks at all of North America, rather than just[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…