Inside GMT Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerI picked this book up mostly for the reproductions of a series of sketches of the California Missions. In 1856 they were already largely abandoned, and would soon decay into a ruined state (and by the text, this had already[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Okay, with the title and subtitle, my original thought that this would be a look at draconic culture where power politics flows around and through the aspects of mating, and you know, not getting killed in the world. I was[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is an expansive history of about sixty years, across a fair amount of space. It’s also a fairly limited history, largely confined to what “white people” were doing. This is, in large part, man-vs-nature history, with strange people coming[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Howl’s Moving Castle series are all independent books; you can read them separately without any trouble. Howl and Sophie are secondary characters in this third and last installment, as the focus is squarely on a new character, and new[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The main problem with study of the Mexican-American War is that it is severely overshadowed by the later Civil War. Instead of struggling against the problem, this book embraces it, tracing the careers of several prominent ACW generals through this[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Okay, lets start by setting expectations: The advertising blurb mentions ‘the life of Archimedes’, suggesting a big, dense, fictional biography via novel. No, this is a tight fairly plot-focused lighter novel taking place over maybe a single year (probably not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This book gave me a bad impression early on when the introduction states, “All the land taken from Mexico, historians now acknowledge, could have been acquired peacefully through diplomacy and deliberate negotiation of financial recompense.” That’s a rather big pill[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This book is two things in one. First, it is an art book showcasing Graham Turner’s art on the Wars of the Roses. Second, it is a light history of those wars, illustrated with Turner’s paintings, and a number of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
So, the New Frontiers series settles down into a series at this point. There’s some rough patches. It’s still a shorter novel, and feels more like an expanded episode than a novel. Part of that… I think is that it[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Written about two decades before starting his epic five-volume history of the Hundred Years War, Sumption’s history of the fall of southern France follows along the same general lines. In this case, the second chapter goes into a general long-term[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…