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 Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerHarold 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…
As usual, Osprey’s Campaign series does an excellent job of presenting the background and people involved in the battle in question. In this case, the later stages of the Wars of the Roses, and Richard III’s reign are covered very[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s title on the Wars of the Roses is typical of their Man-at-Arms line. Half the book is a good simple history of the period, and a fairly solid introduction to it. There’s no details, no sense of the people,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Just finished reading Stephen Turnbull’s Battles of the Samurai today. While it is exactly what the title implies, a study of nine battles from Japanese history (ranging from Kurikara in 1183 to Sekigahara in 1600), it is also a good[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror a couple days ago. I’ll admit I was a bit surprised when I started it. I wasn’t expecting a 600-page book in 8-point type in oversized paperback format. This is a long[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ospery has been doing a bunch of ‘Battle Tactics’ books recently. I think it would have been neat if they’d made them their own line, instead of just part of the Elite series. I decided to start off with the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Lost to the West is a very good readable brief history of the Byzantine Empire, and I recommend it as such to anyone who would like to familiarize themselves with the subject. However, the subtitle “The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
My roommate Dave just wrote a snarky little rant about the quality of Baen’s main authors. There are some points I disagree with, but at the same time I have to agree with the overall assessment. The main thing I[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Been meaning to get to this for ages. I try to leaven all my fiction reading with some non-fiction. As my primary interest is history, I generally end up reading something about the past. I don’t care for dry academic[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…