Shawn

I'm conflicted on this book. On the one hand, I generally enjoyed it? I think? I mean, I started it at like 9:30 on a work night after finishing my previous book and finished it at midnight the same night, so it definitely kept me turning pages.

That said, I also think the book could've been so, so much better.

The gist of the plot is: the Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot (note: this is NOT an alt-history of any sort so don't expect any detail on how that all goes down or anything; the point is simply that it's early-60's American and the nearest big city to our cast gets nuked). The one guy in the neighborhood who had the foresight to build a fallout shelter in his backyard orders his family in as the sirens go off. The neighbors, who know about the shelter but did nothing but make fun of the family for being paranoid, bum rush his place and, after a struggle, some of them make it into the shelter with the main family.

The bulk of the story, then, is about how these people get on when forced to live in a dubiously-supplied shelter, particularly given that half of them forced their way in against the will of the guy who built it.

It's a very small-scale story that focuses on the various pair-relationships between shelter inhabitants. Backgrounds on those relationships are provided via flashback chapters quite often, showing how those folks interacted prior to the bombs going off.

The story does best when focusing on the protagonist, Scott. He's a nearly-teenaged boy, the son of the shelter-builder, who I identified quite a bit with. He's a “good kid”, but his best “friend”, who ends up in the shelter as well, is quite not, and keeps trying to lead him astray. These tensions amp up in the shelter, naturally, and the author handles this relationship in particular with a deft hand. It reads honestly as a relationship that could've existed in reality.

Scott's father is portrayed with a kind hand as well. He reads like a lot of dads I've known (though not my own): he means well, but lacks some of the tools, particularly in the empathy category, to be a truly-good dad. And a lot of his mistakes are effectively made against his own will and correct instinct, driven by societal pressure instead. After the bombs go off, the dude is in a truly shit situation, and he handles it (and this is a beef I have with the book in general) just about as well as anybody could. I'm not sure if this character is believable in extremis, but his pre-war characterization reads pretty true.

Some of the “bad” characters, however, are pretty ham-handed. Bad Kid's father, in particular, is almost a caricature of an effete, college professor liberal of the nascent go-go 60's, letting his kid drink wine at dinner until he's hammered, leaving Playboys about, and sneering at his less-refined neighbors construction of a shelter in the first place. The guy sucks, in an almost unbelievable way.

Likewise, the women characters are pretty thin, the black housekeeper particularly so. They serve largely as props for the men to act against, even though they're often the smartest people in the room.

My prime beef with the book is that it's somehow too optimistic. I don't think this scenario would or even could play out as neatly as it does; even given the death and conflict involved, it's... not enough, somehow, given the enormity of the catastrophe that has obviously occurred to the world. I don't want to spoil how it all plays out, but I ended the book with a pretty heavy sense of “well, that could've been much worse”.

Lastly, I want to mention that the book miserably fails the test of Chekhov's Gun, which is always infuriating.

So, I dunno... I chewed through the book fast, it's a page-turner, but I think I was turning pages mostly waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it effectively doesn't. I also enjoyed the writing of the lead character enough to be invested in his fate, at least, if not of many of the others. If you like explorations of how people forced into extreme close-contact scenarios will behave, you'd probably enjoy Fallout, just know that it certainly lies on the optimistic side of the genre. Even though New York gets nuked.

A solid entry in the series, but starting to strain the suspension of disbelief that the same six-seven people are constantly at the center of these epochal, shattering moments for humanity. So, on that note, I'm glad that they're moving into the “final” trilogy of The Expanse with the following book, Persepolis Rising.

As for THIS book, it brings a generally satisfactory conclusion to the story of Marcos Inaros and his Free Navy's rebellion against Earth/Mars/OPA. I'm basically just glad to see Marcos go away (spoiler) because he's a paper-thin caricature of an evil bad guy who was never really developed much beyond being a necessary plot agent. His background with Naomi was rather insubstantial, his relationship with their child almost Darth Vader-ian in its comical abuse... what he did to Earth is genuinely disturbing, and I almost wish they spent more time dealing with the effects of the attacks, but the background info we get via Avasarala does a pretty good job of conveying just how fucked things are.

That said, the fact that the 1300 new worlds and many new colonies that we know are out there spend this entire book basically out of sight entirely is distressing; I get that we have to settle our home solar system's story here, but jesus christ do I hope that the final trilogy takes place amongst these new worlds already (I know the first book is already out and thus I could already know if that's what's going on, but I'm saving the entire final trilogy to binge on once it's all released, inshallah).

So, while not quite as cool as the first trilogy (Marcos is no Miller in terms of being Holden's primary foil), Babylon's Ashes does a solid job of fulfilling the usually-difficult mission of wrapping up the middle act of a series. If you've enjoyed the series to this point, I doubt you'll not enjoy this entry as well.

I'll be blunt: this book is a goddamned triumph.

I liked this book so much that I read all 800 pages of it even though the e-book had a glaring processing problem that caused it to insert a space after every double-f in the text (and some other cases I couldn't pin down a precise cause for). So, every time like “offered” was in the text, which was a surprisingly large number of times, it showed up as “off ered”.

This was AMAZINGLY distracting. And normally the sort of thing that would cause me to bail out and wait for Amazon to fix the copy or something, but not in this case. The book, from Page One, was just too good.

Admittedly, I'll basically read anything even tangentially related to the Byzantine Empire. But even if you don't particularly care about that narrow topic, say you're just a “history buff” in general, this is the sort of work you absolutely should read.

Why? Well, Ms Hughes pulls off the herculean task of integrating classic history of the “which ruler sent what general to fight which enemy for what reasons” type, with the more modern aspects of “and how did that affect the culture, economy, mores, religion, etc., of the common man/woman/eunuch/slave of the polity?” type, AND does it all with a measure of style and competence that few authors are able to pull off successfully.

The book moves roughly chronologically through the “Three Cities” of the title; starting with the ancient Greek polis of Byzantion, then moving through the long epoch of the Roman/Byzantine Constantinople, then wrapping up with the world capital of Ottoman/Islamic/Turkish Istanbul. For such a long book, it moves remarkably briskly, helped along by economical chapter lengths and a vibrant writing style that generates that almost novel-esque sense of “just one more chapter” that few works of non-fiction ever achieve.

While firmly a history book, each chapter tends to start off with a wonderful and personalizing vignette from the author's own experience of researching for that chapter, situating the historical time about to be discussed in the modern age, which really helps pull the reader in and serves additionally as just great color. It also forces the reader to occasionally consider the randomness of history at time; sometimes your ancient relic becomes the still-venerated Hagia Sophia hundreds of years later. Other times, you're an equally-stunning ancient mosaic buried in the basement of a kebob joint behind a cell phone store. Such is fate. 

VERY few histories give any nods to these also-rans of importance, and that Hughes does in this book jarred me into thinking for a bit about the caprice of history, the undeniable fact that what we today consider important about the past may not have been what the past considered important about itself, and that so much is left to the random chance of what managed to survive the millennia between a building or work of art's original period of importance and the reignition of interest in that original period by a much-later time. Basically, how many Michelangelo's “David”s are we missing out on today because nobody cared three hundred years ago and repurposed something beautiful into a roof for a barn? 

It's this effect of the book I enjoyed most; at times I would read something that would force me to put the book down and just let my mind wander down a path it never had before, to consider some arcane detail of 1700's Constantinople that I hadn't thought of. 

The breadth of knowledge Hughes shows here is also commendable; being able to write authoritatively about how an ancient Greek polis organizes itself politically is typically an entirely separate discipline from say describing in detail the personal politics of a reform-era Ottoman Sultan's harem. She handles both, and all of the other disparate topics that come up in a history of this breadth, with aplomb. 

Bottom line, this book is just a delight. If you like good history, read it. If you're a fan of anything Byzantine or Ottoman, read it. If you like just plain good writing, read it. It's got that kind of cross-genre appeal few books pull off without being “lite” in their treatment of the topic, an accusation that absolutely cannot be laid at Ms Hughes' feet here; it is that rare bird, the Serious Work of History that is also an absolute joy to read. It gets my highest recommendation.

I wanted to dislike this book. I didn't love Lyons' Fake Steve Jobs shit, I don't particularly like tales, fictional or not, of “oddball miscreant doesn't fit in but is secretly smarter than everyone in the In Group”, but I realized that something I dislike more than all of those is Start-Up Culture. That, combined with the recommendation of a good friend who has worked for nothing but Silicon Valley startups since we met in the late 90's, was enough to get me to read this thing.

I've also worked for some startups, but only of the Web 1.0 variety and certainly not in California. I had fun, made life-long friends and learned a lot. I did NOT become a millionaire or even a thousandaire, really. And I learned that startups are mostly bullshit and hot air, and what wealth any of them generate is mostly extracted at an extreme discount from young, smart but naive kids who don't know any better.

Disrupted does one thing pretty goddamned well: show what fucking insane, intense bullshit almost all startups are. They're snake-oil factories, run, often, by borderline sociopaths who will extract value from the labor of their employees and use that to pump up valuations with a goal of getting a new business over the hump of being a startup and turning it into a long-term profitable business. HAHAHAHAHAHAH JUST FUCKING KIDDING! The goal is to baffle venture/vulture capitalists into ponying up a large number of millions in VC funding and then keep the smokescreen up using that money until an IPO occurs, at which point anywhere from one to even five folks get really rich and everybody else gets fucked when the business inevitably collapses under the weight of real-world expectations of profitability that their horseshit business idea never had a snowball's chance in hell of meeting.

This is the story of those 99 out of 100 startups that, somehow, the completely-compromised tech “press” manages to rarely if ever cover. The ones that fail, completely and with a lot of wreckage left behind. The simple truth is: very, very few people get rich at this shit, and it's mostly a whole lot of people who ponied up a whole lot of sweat equity getting a whole lot of fucked.

Disrupted, in particular, tells that story of one specific real-world firm the middle-aged and suddenly-careerless author finds himself working for as a not-really-even-wanted media/marketing/PR flack dude. He's surrounded by millennials for whom this is a first gig so they love all the fluffy, non-work-related bullshit (parties! free beer! nerf swordfights!) that they're getting in lieu of, say, a living wage or health care. They're also stunningly, spectacularly bad at their jobs, according to the old-media author who's been dumped into their midst, and whose many decades of hard-earned, real-world work experience is about as welcome and wanted as a fart at a funeral. Lyons quickly also realizes that his immediate bosses weren't told about him being hired, and that the big boss who did hire him probably did so solely for the small bit of real-world media cachet Lyons' name carried as a former writer for Newsweek crossed with the bit of Internet fame he had as the Fake Steve Jobs guy.

Hijinks ensue as Dan bravely tries to do real work and come up with real projects that might actually turn into something useful for a company he's never quite sure has an actual product worth investing in or buying. Eventually, things sour, Dan leaves, and a weird coda occurs where (ALLEGEDLY) his former bosses at this place get wind of his book idea and possibly break into his house to steal the laptop it's being written on. Read the book if you want the details of that; suffice to say that I liked that part best because it hammers home the point that too many people are otherwise willing to hem and haw about: most of these tech start-up founders are real fuckers, if not outright sociopaths. And I don't mean in the “well, Steve Jobs was a real asshole” way; Steve at least was an asshole in service of a vision that actually produced beautiful products and created thousands of good jobs and made a whole lot of people lots of money and so on. The founders in this book, of which there are a lot more of in the world than there are Steve Jobs, know their product is shit and rely on every old school, pre-Internet trick the sales greaseballs of the world have been using to scam people out of money since a neanderthal with slicked-back hair and a tamer-than-yours mastodon to ride around on sold ice to an eskimo. If anything, Lyons doesn't hammer this point home enough: a very lot of the startups that are hailed as innovative, new technology wonders are actually nothing more than classic sales scams dressed up in new suits; think Theranos moreso than Google.

In the end, I liked this book because it was a great hate read, in the tradition of how I enjoyed PJ O'Rourke (before he went full Cato) and still enjoy Matt Taibbi (until Putin orders Trump to have him rubbed out). It's a total case of a book reinforcing shit I'm already mostly in agreement with, which isn't what I usually seek out in a book, but I need one or two of those a year just to keep me steady.

It's by no means a great book, but it sets hard facts against a lot of shit I already suspected was going on in that industry in general, and Dan's a good-enough writer to where it was surprisingly fun to get through. I can't recommend it unless you have worked at a start-up yourself, really, or are at least really familiar with the tropes of Silly Valley start-up culture. If you're a complete outsider to all of that, you're just going to think “what a bunch of useless assholes” without also getting to enjoy all the inside baseball snark the book is quite enjoyably larded up with.

The Change. A great Deus Ex Apocalyptica for a now quite long-running series of books. A long-running series of books that, for the middle run, I struggled with continuing to read.

I liked the first few books very much; going through the actual horrors of The Change and watching tiny bands of devastated survivors struggle to establish new societies and fight off their enemies was very enjoyable.

Then, the Ren Faire nonsense started becoming increasingly prominent and I enjoyed it less and less. This is a personal thing; I just generally don't dig fantasy, magic, any of that, and would have happily enjoyed reading about the neo-medieval + understanding germ theory and having bicycles world that was being established. But magic swords and seers and demons all started becoming prominent.

Stirling lost me for a while, though once a year or so I would begrudgingly zip through the latest release in the series, reading the occasional paragraph aloud to my wife until I could actually hear her eyes roll and she started Googling divorce lawyers...

All of that said, I'm enjoying this... what I'll refer to as Third Generation series a bit more. We're a few generations into The Change. Honestly, Game of Thrones (TV show, not the turgid doorstop of a book series) has opened me open a little to fantasy in general, though The Change could stand to borrow a little more of the latter's much more believable grittiness and shittiness of humanity rather than the pretty stark black and white world it presents. So I'm more accepting of the premise that magic-y stuff exists, though lightly outside of the actual ruler of Montival and their sword and the bad guys (formerly CUT, now without even a name throughout an entire goddamned book because we haven't even really MET them yet but hey, gotta churn one of these out a year... do I fear some creeping Turtledove-ism? Maybe). And while I still find the lack of environmental impact of the complete collapse of the industrial world (aside from literally one toss-off sentence about how Pacific fish might not be super-safe to eat near the shores of dead Seattle, c'mon now) nor much mention of just how much shit would still be lying around even 50 years after The Change... I dunno. Stirling is a pretty compelling world builder, and now the series is taking place in entirely his own creation instead of a mix of our time and his new one, and it generally works.

I like the expanded scope he's setting up this new series (or three) to take place in; the chapter featuring “King Birmo”, a VERY thinly-veiled future version of contemporary author John Birmingham (who is just outstanding himself, if you haven't read him or somehow don't follow him on Twitter) and describing what's going on in post-Change Australia is delightful, even if it sets us up for a whopping zero bit of followup (though I fully expect we're not done with Australia yet, just might be another book or two before we get there).

Likewise, the extended sections covering Queen Reiko's past and how Japan got through The Change are thoroughly enjoyable as well.

That said, this book is all setup for what I imagine will be four-five books before we're all said and done. Every generation must have its Quest, in the post-Change world, and they are not tales told quickly.

The addition of non-American (Montival-an?) elements goes a long way towards squashing the incessant dopey medieval English/Scottish/Irish-isms that were about all we got in the middle books of the series; now I can at least pretty much glaze over the excessive descriptions of what a McClintock is wearing or what feast a Mackenzie is eating or yaaaaaaaawn... this is Stirling's big weakness, and he indulges the SHIT out of it in this book, as he has in every preceding one as well. You either like it or you don't; I don't love it but can get past it.

Stirling's love of descriptive writing serves him better with the military side of things, not that there's much of that in this entry.

The key thing to know about The Golden Princess, as a book, is this: It's ALL setup for future books.

And that's fine, but know that going in. If you're expecting a typical self-contained three-arc genre action novel, you'll be disappointed; there's no payoff at all, not even really a cliffhanger because no action really occurs; we're being introduced to a wide new set of characters in great detail, and the nature of what they'll have to accomplish is being woven into detail, but THAT'S IT in this particular book. You're committing to reading a bunch more over the next few years so if that kind of commitment is off-putting, don't get started).

That said, Stirling's batting average over his entire career, for me, is quite high, and he's a stellar world-builder who can really give the reader a sense of the world being acted in, so I don't mind that an entire not-short novel was spent here on that sort of thing at the expense of anything actually happening. I think this new Quest for this new generation is going to be entertaining, and it sounds like a good chunk of the early action is going to take us through post-Change Los Angeles and Southern California, which should be great fun. And Birmo's Australia looms in the background, waiting to be looped into the story, and I'm sure that will be as crazily fun as Birmo's own writing is in THIS timeline.

So, if you've already been enjoying The Change series, you'll probably enjoy this. If you're daunted by how big this series is already, you can safely start here because it's basically a whole new story at this point, and there's more than enough background on how we got here presented in this volume to get you up to speed.

I just hope the payoff is worth the investment, because I can already tell this series is going to weigh in a quite a few thousand pages when it's all said and done.

I need top stop reading this dude. He's gone from “inventive scenario dude” to “hackneyed formula puker-upper” and it's just sad at this point. This is “The War That Came Early” with nukes. How you can have a book where a large number of the world's cities are flattened by nukes yet still have a book that plods and offers the dramatic tension of damp toast is beyond me. Again, we're treated to the points of view of numerous unmemorable low-level flunkies far away from any centers of decision, and whatever action they're near is so bland and unaffecting as to solicit a shrug at best anyways.

The only leader we hear from is Harry Truman, in a characterization so simple and bland as to be unbelievable.

I dunno. I've heard that Turtledove's editors just have a whip to his back and that's why he's robotically churning out these increasingly shitty series, but it's really sad coming from the guy who wrote GUNS OF THE SOUTH and WORLDWAR.

This book was... ok. I liked some of the concepts (the multi-“person” empire leader who can basically argue with herself), the ships-as-people (not particularly novel but well-executed here), the nod to explaining the economic foundations of the polities that is so-often glossed over in these kinds of books or simplified to unrealistic levels...

And yet... and yet...

I don't know that I'll bother with the sequel. For a galaxy-spanning world, the stories felt oddly small and unaffecting in scope. Maybe I'm also just tired of the “hard-bidden, super-capable ex-loyal military person/bot/ship/thing gains humanity and wants revenge” trope that is the heart of this story.

It's well-written, flows nicely, has some good world-building and action sequences and such, but lacks the majesty and true Otherness of my favorites in this arena (think mid-period John Varley as what I consider the epitome of the style).

I've got the sequel saved in a wishlist for that rainy day when I must have some sci-fi in case nothing else is intriguing, but I don't know that I'll ever pull the trigger on it.

Taken at the Flood is a very solid, readable history of a somewhat obscure era in Roman history: their conquest of the Greek lands (defined here as basically ancient Macedonia along with everything south of it and west through Thrace including modern European Turkey) during the 2nd Century BCE.

Waterfield's thesis is simply that Rome followed a recognizably imperialist plan in their slow digestion of the Greek lands, and that this should be acknowledged as such as a more valid explanation than the opposing and common claim that Rome was drawn into Greek internal strife by the Greeks themselves and ended up basically “accidentally” taking over the whole place against their wishes.

Alongside a pretty-standard chronological history of events (with useful sidebars into the effect of these events on Roman and Greek self-image, art, society, etc.), Waterfield includes his justifications for how this course of events supports his belief that this was a planned, imperialist event on Rome's part, using what records we have from letters, proclamations, etc., to reveal motive behind the actions that can be easily interpreted as imperialistic.

The argument he makes is solid; it's hard to look at the totality of Roman actions in this period along with the actual outcomes over time and not come to the conclusion that Rome was acting with purpose towards the elimination of independent freedom of action on the part of the Greeks and to increasingly control their lands, economies and people in ever-more direct fashion.

This is NOT a military history; actual battles are covered very briefly, with the focus remaining firmly on the political and social results of those battles rather than the fighting itself. That said, obviously, key battles that changed the course of overall events are certainly referenced.

The writing is fairly lively, though Waterfield's obvious anti-imperialist bent and disdain for how the Romans went about things comes through a bit strongly at times. I'm not entirely sure our modern dislike of imperialism can be transplanted back to an era where war, pillage and conquering were the way of all polities, but hey, at least he has a viewpoint he's willing to strongly defend.

This particular subset of Roman history isn't exactly drowning in well-written, non-academic writings, so I can unhesitatingly recommend it to anybody interested at all in the topic.

I recently was looking for something to read and realized my understanding of Spanish history pre-Civil War was light on the details, so off to Amazon to look at what's out there.

Man. That's a thin field to pick from.

Hugh Thomas' histories of High Imperial Spain seemed to have the most noise online about them, so I grabbed one and started reading.. meh. “Celebrity biography masquerading as history”. I don't need seven paragraphs on the bloodlines of a minor court functionary, thanks, and it's some serious Big Man history that spends next to no time on economy of social, so I put that volume aside.

The only other general survey that seems to exist in English AND in e-book format is this one, J.H. Elliott's “Imperial Spain”. So I grabbed that.

I tend to lean towards very recent history as there has been a lot of new source material and re-examination going on in a lot of historical fields, particularly since the fall of the USSR and, as regards Spain, the post-Franco era. That said, this book originally dates from the 70's, I believe, but you wouldn't know it from the reading. The author is clear to note that he considered his research source-challenged for a variety of reasons, and is clear on what points he's making that he believes may change if more evidence is uncovered. I appreciated this clarity of purpose and problems throughout.

Overall, I found this an EXCELLENT history, particularly for the reader who has a good understanding of the general flow of European, Colonial and Spanish history to begin with. It covers specifically an expanded understanding of the reign of the Habsburg Dynasty over Spain, including the reign of the non-Habsburg Catholic Kings that immediately preceded it as well as the very beginning of the Bourbon Dynasty that supplanted it.

This ordering, his choice of which he goes into detail about in the Introduction, makes clear sense as Ferdinand and Isabella obviously finished the Reconquista, thereby ushering in “modern Spain” as an entity in the first place, and they set the table for the entire Habsburg reign that would see Spain rise to its absolute height of imperial power and majesty as well as crash from that perch in disastrous fashion. The Bourbon denouement serves as a proper coda to the entire era, immediately after which Spain effectively retreated into a broken shell of itself for, arguably, two more centuries.

Elliott gives equal focus to the domineering personalities of this era as well as broader socio-economic forces at play that influenced the range of and final choices of action those “Big Men” could choose from. This is, in my opinion, the proper mix that history should aspire to, as I don't believe in either a pure Big Man or Inevitable Trend view of history, so I was glad to see it strongly represented here. He doesn't go into great detail on, say, the myriad military campaigns that occurred throughout this era, instead focusing on the effects of those campaigns upon greater Spanish politics, society and economy. As the military efforts of any one Habsburg ruler of Spain could easily fill its own thick volume, again, I agree with the author's choice here.

The writing is quite lively and enjoyable, which helps when dealing with such a large book covering such a wide topic. As an example, here's his description of Charles II, one of the last and arguably the worst of Spain's sovereigns during this period: “The poor King himself, the centre of so many hopes, turned out to be a rachitic and feeble-minded weakling, the last stunted sprig of a degenerate line.”

That's... some powerfully descriptive stuff right there.

Elliott doesn't go overboard with this sort of flowery language, saving it for when its impact is actually called for. One can tell that he has written a lot in his career and has put a lot of work into sharpening his craft. The book moves along thanks to this, going into enough detail to evoke the scenes and settings without getting mired down in minutiae that doesn't add to the overall understanding.

Just to note, there are a few small technical problems with the e-book addition; there's a handful of garbled phrases and the maps, which look to have been low-detail linework typical of 70's history books to begin with, were not scanned well, with spine seams visible and a muddy resolution at best. Be prepared to Google some more-readable maps when they pop up.

Overall, though, particularly given the paucity of books covering this topic, I can whole-heartedly recommend this volume for anyone looking for a general history of Imperial Spain.

This book is... decent. Just okay. It doesn't inspire and set aflame the reader's imagination and mind like a good Barbara Tuchman book, nor does it offend and depress like the latest Niall Ferguson.

What is IS, is a nice synthesis of all the currently-prevailing theories regarding what the heck happened around 1180BCE that sent the entire ancient world straight to hell, but doesn't bring anything new to the table (though I guess, unless you're a history/archaeology/anthropology nerd such as me, a lot of it probably is new info). The chapter-launching overviews of specific details that paint a picture of life back then were my favorite parts, but overall it's pretty dry and gets way down in the weeds regarding how a specific fragment of pottery referenced this one guy who's name was spelled this way in Egyptian so it was probably this other dude referenced in this other thing... LOT of dry detail like that.

So, not quite a straight-up pop history like 1491 or the like, more like Diamond's work in the reading but without the inflammatory conclusions made mostly for branding purposes that the latter is rightly condemned for.

Phenomenal book. Just an excellent history of the rapid descent into madness that was the summer of 1914 in Europe, followed by an excellent history of the continent-wide conflict until things settled into their winter stasis, a stasis that would last for four more bloody years on the Western Front.

There are plenty of very in-depth reviews of this book already available, so I want to focus on the highlights as seen by a reader who was already pretty familiar with the entirety of World War I:

- A proper overview of the main competing theories regarding “who is to blame for WWI” (I particularly loved the potshots at what I must I assume is Niall Ferguson's “it's all Britain's fault” theories)
- No-hedging explanations of which theories Hastings himself believes most valid
- While the Western Front gets its focus and time, the Polish/Galician and Serbian Fronts also get theirs
- Proper coverage of the initial frontier battles that were as bloody as anything that happened on the Somme or at Verdun but that almost no one thinks of today
- Proper coverage of the fact the Germany, tactically and strategically, was basically every bit as bumbling as the Western Allies were, but their initial logistics and commitment level gave them a brief early edge
- Excellent personality analysis of the leading personalities on each side, from the Kaiser to the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF to lesser generals who ended up playing big roles in certain events
- Excellent coverage of “the little guy”, from the soldiers in the trenches (tons of primary source material from letters and post-war interviews), to civilian victims of battles and occupations...

There's really no aspect of the first year of the war left unturned in this book, save for the African and some of the non-European-water naval campaigns. Hastings does make sure, though, to tell the reader why these topics aren't germane to his particular book, which is appreciated, because it is a question I would have wondered about had it not been addressed.

Style-wise, Hastings doesn't try to tone down the drama inherent in the topic; Catastrophe 1914 often flows like a novel, particularly when discussing the actual progress of a battle, as the view shifts from the commanders down to the front-line soldiers and the civilians trying to get out of the way. While quite scholarly, it is also eminently readable.

So, we have a wonderful mix of myth-busting, a firm point of view expressed clearly and defended against its likely opponents, and stellar writing to accompany the narrative along. This is really up there with Barbara Tuchman's “The Guns of August” as far as must-have books covering the descent into The Great War. It gets my highest recommendation.

Chuck's a lil' too far up his own asshole with this one. I've greatly enjoyed his previous non-fiction works, mostly because he hasn't tried to imbue his criticism of pop ephemera with much in the way of greater meaning. It's pop culture, his books should be tasty little snacks that recall the specific period they are writing about, and that's it.

THIS collection of pop culture essays, though, has a theme. A rather muddled one about the nature of villainy and how our culture views its villains, with a healthy dash of self-chest-thumping “I always root for the bad guy, so I must be a bad guy” weirdness sprinkled throughout.

It just doesn't click on that level for me. Taken as a series of essays about various bad dudes from the last fifty years ago, it approaches a fun read. But the constant, tortured analysis of how each particular person fits into the grander theme of modern villainy ruins what little flow the book ever builds up.

Particularly annoying is the end. There is no grand wrap-up of the damned theme he's shoehorned in throughout the rest of the book, just a summary of the last person's particular villainy. And the last sentence is just the absolute worst.

Chuck's had a very solid track record on his career so far so a misstep was inevitable and I believe this is it. I hope he recovers and realizes that there's nothing wrong with being “just” a really outstanding pop culture essayist and decent novelist.

Very good, detailed, readable overview of a weird fuckin' century. Worth it for the Cadaver Pope interlude alone.

G.J. Meyer has a shtick. He writes “provocative” histories about “provocative” subjects that are mostly designed to help him stack cheddah by serving as the basis for “provocative”, historical-ish drama series on cable TV.

You may recall his earlier book, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty, (and, man, revel in the sheer clickbaitiness of that very title) which was the source material for the BBC series, much like The Borgias provided the basis for Showtime's canceled series of the same name. I read that book a couple of years ago and found it entertaining, but also ludicrous. Entertaining simply because you'd have to work very hard to write a boring book about the Tudors. Ludicrous because of the second aspect of G.J. Meyer's shtick: his books almost always go against the “conventional wisdom” and sport theses that make pure academic historians spit blood. For example, the gist of The Tudors was, really, that Henry wasn't an absolute bastard of a monster. Somehow. When, in fact: he totes was.

Likewise, The Borgias: The Hidden History, in which Meyer tries to argue that the Borgias were not the monsters that almost all of history has made them out to be, but were rather just typical of any ennobled family of the time in how they used their wealth and power to reinforce each other and that, further, much of the horribleness attributed to them is outright false. To Meyer's credit, I think he makes a much stronger case here than he did with The Tudors.

The book makes its case by alternating chapters between the main chronological narrative of the three primary Borgias (Rodrigo the Pope, Cesare the alleged inspiration for Machiavelli's “The Prince”, and Lucrezia, possibly the most vilified woman of the Middle Ages) and what I'd call “context” chapters. The context chapters are quite useful in terms of situating the reader in how, say, the Papacy worked during the era in which the Borgias were active with it. Likewise, he explains Italian politics, international diplomacy... basically any topic where the reader may have an understanding of how it operates today, but NOT how it operated then. So these chapters help educate the user AND reinforce one of Meyer's main arguments: that while a lot of what the Borgias did may seem unsavory to modern mores, they were not at all out of line with contemporary standards (an argument Meyer makes, I think, successfully over the course of the book) and, actually, were near-saintly when compared to other major figures of the day (this argument, not so much).

At any rate, the framework is very solid and keeps the user properly informed on the context needed to understand the narrative events as they unfold.

As for that narrative, I wish the writing of it were more exciting. For being about an era positively brimming with strong personalities, amazing new art, sex, epic violence, etc., the book is a bit of a slog to get through.

Part of the slog is due to the voluminous chat about sourcing interspersed throughout. To Meyer's credit, most of this is segregated from the main narrative in a way that makes it easy to skip over if source-talk ain't your jam. I think this is partially an over-reaction to the eyerolls that greeted his thesis about Henry VIII in The Tudors being actually a nice guy, and partially the usual work of a historian going into detail about their sources to validate their interpretation of them. I found it interesting, and believe he did an effective job of highlighting how his sources (and, to be honest, primary sources on the Borgias are remarkably limited so he's quite thorough about it), once analyzed for bias, actually rather strongly support his own arguments. You may disagree, but I didn't have that sense of “wow, this author is really contorting things to make it work here” that I sometimes get when reading through a writer's own analysis of their source materials as related to their argument.

Overwhelming sourcing chat aside, Meyer does move the reader along from the rise of Rodrigo from minor Castilian nobility to leader of the Church, through Cesare's brilliant but notorious and violent rise and even more notorious fall, and finishes up with a good discussion of the whorification of Lucrezia. While the least “action-packed” part of the story, the sections focusing on Lucrezia were the most interesting to me, as they are basically a textbook for how shoddily any woman who rose to any sort of prominence could be expected to be treated both by her contemporaries and by later writers. Of the three main subjects of the book, I think Meyer makes his most compelling case regarding history having given these folks a bad rap when it comes to the unfortunate Borgia sister/bargaining chip/marriage prize.

So, yeah, I think Meyer does a solid job of making his case, if overselling it a bit with both Rodrigo and Cezare, in this book, but really wish he had somehow injected the spirit of the age he is covering into his writing on it. People and events this interesting shouldn't turn into quite this much of a slog when set down on paper.

Like all literate middle-aged white guys, the percentage of my reading that involves the Roman Empire or World War II goes up a little bit every year. By the time we hit 60 or so, it's All Rommel, All The Time. But, for now, Rome still gets a book or two of my attention every year.

I know enough about Roman history to where I don't go for the general pop histories or pop biographies much at this point; I've got the background down as well as any non-specialist can. That said, I'm also a firm believer in revisiting my assumptions every decade or so, and this book has been garnering high praise from all corners, so I figured it'd be a worthy entry into this year's book run and a nice way to refresh what I think I know about Rome's founding, the Republic and the Empire to its height.

That, by the way, is the time period which this book covers; the rise, the peak, but not the fall. I rather enjoyed Beard's disclaimer that the fall of Rome is a topic for another book by another author (the “fall” of Rome has been getting some major revisioning over the last twenty years or so; see Peter Heather's “The Fall of the Roman Empire” for a fantastic overview of the current prevailing theories written for a general audience). So, be aware: this isn't a history of the ENTIRE range of time the “Roman Kingdom/Empire/Republic” existed; It's Rome from the mysts of pre-history to 212CE when the Emperor Carracala extended Roman citizenship to every freeman in the Empire. That's a nice stopping point (Roman history offers many) if you wish to focus on what us moderns consider “Roman” to mean; after that point, the nature of the Empire fundamentally changed, Christianity became a thing, and everything went to hell more often than not... like the author rightly notes; that's a different story, better handled on its own, separately.

While sort-of chronological in its telling, Beard skips around a bit, starting in the age of Cicero and, specifically, the Cataline Conspiracy as a way to introduce the reader into thinking about what the Romans themselves, at the time, thought “Rome” and “being Roman” meant. This is the running theme throughout her book, and it serves well as a spine to grow the body of a narrative around.

Rather than sticking strictly chronological, Beard organizes the book more or less around big themes, and proceeds to examine them based on what we know and, more importantly, how contemporary Romans viewed those topics. Always being careful to mention what evidentiary constraints she's working with, the author takes us through what it meant to be an ancient Roman king, an interesting topic particularly because we have next to no contemporary evidence for that but a fair amount from later Romans who were already viewing the Kingship era as history themselves. Likewise, she presents an in-depth discussion of what it meant to be a Roman emperor; did they really think that they were gods? What did that mean in the context of Roman religion, where some gods were apparently more god-y than others?

It's fun stuff, and she carries this approach through to all of the topics presented here. In common with the current trend in history of trying to discern more about how the common folk lived as compared to the exhaustively researched lives of the ruling and rich classes, Beard gives us what she can on the P in SPQR. There's actually a fair bit of archaeological evidence to play with regarding the lives of regular people, and, thanks to the pretty high level of literacy (for an ancient society), even a good amount of written records to call upon as well. She pulls all of this evidence together well, giving us as much of a look into how we would've been likely to live back then (regardless of what your fortune-teller tells you, you were much MUCH more likely to have been a peasant than a prince in a past life. Sorry).

Also entertaining is her brief discussion of the Christians who, in the timeframe of this book, were a small, annoying cult as opposed to the Official And Only Religion of Rome that they became later. Reading from the letters of a harassed Roman governor from what is now Turkey writing to Rome for guidance on what to DO with these twits is amusing. Less amusing but still interesting is the Emperor's response of “don't concern yourself overmuch with them if they're just being annoying. If they get seriously unruly, though, kill them”.

Maybe it's just because I spend my actual educational years reading about Great Men and Great Battles to the point of utter exhaustion, but I really, REALLY appreciate authors like Beard and the books they produce. I want much more work done on the grand themes of a given historical era and/or society as they impacted ALL levels of society. I'm really beyond done with books that solely concern themselves with the king and his direct minions (this may be why I've never cottoned to historical biographies at all; the stories of Important Figures are, er, important, but I also want to know, if at all possible, what the people who had these stories inflicted on them without any input felt about things).

So, in the end, SQPR is a fantastically written exploration of Rome from its beginnings to its peak, organized in a modern fashion around big themes and great concepts moreso than great people, which is welcome. Pair it with the work by Heathers I mention early on in this review and you'll be nicely up to date on the current state of the historiography of the entire Roman Era.

Last year, I read the first two books of this trilogy, Mr Ackroyd's comprehensive overview of the history of England from earliest times up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. And I loved them. I came into this entire series with a bias as I had read, a few years earlier, his London: The Autobiography, which was a GODDAMNED OUTSTANDING history/mash note of/to that awesome, insane city.

So, yeah, long story short, Ackroyd knows and does England well. It's his thing.

One of the key aspects of this series that makes it manageable (even at three volumes) is its sharp, laser-focus on England. This is not a history of Great Britain, or the Empire, or the colonies, or even Ireland or Scotland. It's about England, that weird little 2/3rds of a rather dumpy, damp island that has punched orders of magnitude above its weight in human affairs for a couple of centuries now. Mr. Ackroyd makes no apologies for this focus; one of the tasks of the historian-as-author is circumscribing what they're going to present rather than let that admittedly-interesting but increasingly distant from the theme subtopics run away with the entire narrative.

So, for example, the whole complex web of Irish history is pretty much absent save for when it directly impacts the goings-on in England proper. Ditto Scotland. The conflict between the Anglican Church and the Puritans gets a very large chunk of the text devoted to it, as it was extremely important, particularly in the time period covered by this volume, but, as noted in the book itself, once a large chunk of Puritan leadership decides to fuck off for America, that's the last the book concerns itself with them.

Within the boundaries of these constraints, what you're left with is just a wonderfully detailed, deep look at the people, processes and actions that shaped England throughout this era. As it was a particularly violent and clamorous time, it lends itself to being a good read. The Stuarts were not quite as bloodily bonkers as the Tudors who preceded them, but what they lacked in personal viciousness they generally made up for in bull-headed, stubborn incompetence. This naturally led to the English Civil War, a fairly catastrophic event for the English people (~140k dead in a country of five million souls is... well, it's a fuckin' LOT), followed by the grim stretch of Cromwell & Son's grey rule over a joy-deprived island.

Ackroyd maintains a lively trip through this otherwise dark and bloody era, leading the reader along through the very bad goings-on but also taking care to show the hard-earned lessons the English learned from their suffering, all culminating in the reestablishment of the monarchy in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Stronger boundaries were proscribed around both the throne's and Parliament's spheres of action by this, and most agreed that it was basically time to shunt religion out of the political arena entirely, leaving it generally up to the individual's conscience. The sense as this volume and series closes is that, for all the blood, the Civil War and Protectorate taught the English people the right lessons that directly led to the next two-odd centuries' worth of general growth and prosperity.

Interspersed throughout this volume, and every volume in the series, are shorter, stand-alone chapters that cover various single important works of art, or scientists, or, in the earlier volumes, what people ate, wore, lived in... these asides add a tremendous amount of color to the otherwise-standard chronological march through time of powerful people and their doings. I enjoyed these breaks from the main narrative, and digging into a chapter on, say, how the writings of John Milton reflected the uncertainties and passion of Republican England adds as much to the reader's understanding of the era as the raw facts do.

In all, this is a wonderful end to a wonderful series by a frankly wonderful author. Ending with the Glorious Revolution is a wise choice, as from there forward the history of England is inextricably intertwined with the story of the Empire and of Europe, and the scope would have to widen considerably. Stopping here allows this series to stand alone as a history of pre-modern England all on its own.

I genuinely like and respect all of Peter Ackroyd's work that I've read to date, and I can heartily recommend this particular series to any reader interested in any aspect of English history. It's definitely a popular history, so no prior knowledge of the topic is required to understand or appreciate the work. But, being popular by no means implies that it is shallow or poorly-done; it's masterfully written and will be equally engaging to those of us who were already quite familiar with the period covered here.

I've read all of Hastings' books so far, even though I generally disagree with his bias and conclusions, because he is a good writer and historian. This book challenges that, though, because it's much more recent history and his personal biases play a much stronger role.

As a history of the events, policies, battles, etc., of the multiple Indochinese wars that occurred from 1945-1975, it's a strong book and a good read. Lots of primary source references and, to his credit, he does a good job keeping the sources coming from both sides of the conflict, even though Vietnamese ones are harder to get for many reasons. As an analysis of why the war was fought the way it was fought, the effects of it, and how it has been interpreted since the war itself ended, I think it's a much weaker read.

This is mostly due to Hastings' unshakeable animus towards socialism/communism. Even though he does a better-than-I-expected job of lambasting the many and various terrible decisions by the French and the Americans that did nothing but worsen, extend, and exacerbate the wars, he still hammers the theme that “yes, we were bad, but the Communists were worse”. And I do not know how you can reach that conclusion from a war in which one side literally killed millions in four different countries without even accomplishing its goals, and the other side simply killed much less, to winning effect.

So the author's bias has to be kept firmly in mind here; that said, I did enjoy reading the book. There are lots of first-person details from both sides, and ground-level, personal stories of how these epochal events are affecting regular people are something I specifically look for in the histories I read today.

Given that so many of the canonical reads about Vietnam focus overmuch on the American experience, and/or are apologias for the decisions of specific individual actors, I can say that I would still recommended this book as a one-volume history of a rather complicated series of events featuring a multi-generational, multi-national cast of actors that is simply not easy to wrangle into a cohesive, single narrative. Hastings does well with that aspect of things, even if his personal leanings as a classic neocon Cold Warrior color his presented conclusions quite deeply.

The_German_WarFor most of the Cold War, the popular consensus regarding “blame” for World War II and the Holocaust ran something along the lines of “well, there were good Germans and bad Germans, and most just wanted to get by, but Hitler and the Gestapo were very bad and willing to hurt people who didn't do what they wanted, ergo, thus, six million Jews somehow WHOOPS died and an entire continent went up in flames”.

This was obviously a very simplistic look at things, but when you combined a West German willingness to toss a LOT of money Israel's way to make up (in some small, unsatisfactory manner) for things along with the United States and NATO's need to have “good” Germans that they could rearm and park on the front line against the Soviet menace backed by their own “bad” Germans, well... everybody basically went along with this view.

Even though it was bullshit.

The first big revision to this viewpoint came after Germany reunified, the Cold War ended, and, instead of there being a binary “good vs. bad” German theme, there just being, well... Germans again. And a Harvard PhD candidate named Daniel Jonah Goldhagen didn't care for the traditional narrative and therefore dropped a bomb on it called “Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in 1996. Disagree or not with his premise that a majority of ALL Germans very much wanted all of the Jews dead (as he doesn't prove this to my own or a lot of other people's satisfactions), what he DID manage to do here was prove that there was really no way the common belief that most Germans had no idea what was going on with the Jews held any water. The gist, and it's hard to believe that this was ever controversial, is simply this:

You cannot kill six million people (and change) without a very large number of people knowing about it, and helping to make it happen.

What “The German War” attempts to do, then, is show what average Germans felt about both the Holocaust and the war in general as it happened, via private letters, diaries, the public opinion polls taken by the SD regularly throughout the war almost to the very end, etc...

It is a much better book than Goldhagen's, which read like what it was: a PhD thesis barely edited into narrative book form, and therefore dry, dense, and repetitive.

Stargardt's book, however, is a fantastic read, though, admittedly, that feels like an odd adjective to use for a book on such a grim topic.

Overwhelmingly sourced (it often feels like every paragraph has a footnote), Stargardt tells the story of a number of Germans, mostly regular people, soldiers, wives, doctors, mothers, but specifically tried to seek out those who a) lasted at least into the war's middle years if not through to the end b) left a record of multiple entries along the way. Basically, he wanted to track changes in how regular Germans felt about the war and the Jews as the Germans went from winning and conquering all before them, from arresting to then deporting to then killing the Jews, and then to being on the defensive, bombed, invaded and, finally, conquered.

There's a brutal melancholy in watching a young wife go from a loving new wife scared of what the war will do to her husband but convinced that Germany needs to defend itself from the assaults of Global Jewry to bombing victim convinced that the bombing is the revenge of the murdered Jews (and thus, somehow unfair) to widow.

The soldiery, as is often the case, figures out faster that what they're doing is indefensible but generally rationalizes their actions as being what must be done if the nation is to survive. It's possibly even sadder to read their stories than the housewives, particularly the more sensitive ones who quickly realize that they're doing unconscionable things that only future generations might benefit from. And, regardless of the terrible things they're doing, it just gets depressing at how many of these stories end with a hard stop when the soldier in question dies.

The details of the individual lives traced here gives this book its narrative thrust, and its emotional impact. To reinforce the author's main point, though, these stories are reinforced with a lot of weight from the popular opinion surveys and mood studies the German SD did throughout the war, almost up to its very end. Goebbels's wanted his propaganda to be effective and, to do that, he needed to know what the people actually thought in order to shape it to his ends. Thanks to this urge, we have a lot of data on what the people actually believed as well as what the German State wanted them to believe.
In the final analysis, I believe Stargardt makes his point well. While the reasonings and self-justification changes depending on which person's words are being reviewed at any given point in the book, the inescapable larger conclusion reached is simply that a) most Germans were very well aware of what was happening to the Jews (and Poles, and Russians, and Ukrainians, etc....). Furthermore, most (but by no means all) Germans were pretty much okay with what was going on, particularly when the German star was in the ascendant. Once fortune turned, many Germans believed that what was happening to them was either retribution for what they had done to the Jews; the main difference seems to be whether a given person thought that this was fair or unfair.

What this book shows is this point: regardless of how a given German felt about what was happening to the Jews and the other victim races, they knew it was happening. And this is a very important point as it goes against what we were led to believe for the many decades of the Cold War era here in the West.

I believe this book has become and will remain the standard regarding contemporary German knowledge of and feelings towards the Holocaust and Germany's part in World War II for years to come.

I read this book in one night.

Something about this one just grabbed me. It hit all of the right notes with me on a cold, wintry weeknight in Chicago, and I stayed up in bed ‘til like 2am to finish it even though my alarm goes off at 5. Been a LONG time since a book got those kind of hooks into me.

I stumbled across this book entirely by accident, too. Somebody raved about it on their Facebook feed, and their lavish recommendation was sprinkled with just enough of the words and phrases that will always grab my attention when talking about new fiction. You know, shit like: “superflu”, “civilization collapses”, “everybody dies”.

That said, this is NOT strictly an apocalypse novel. It's got some things in common with classics of that genre like, say, Stephen King's “The Stand”, but it has MORE in common, if you ask me, with the giants of the “family story” archetype, like Tolstoy's “Anna Karenina”.

Yes, the book kicks off with a flu. A bad one. The kind authors love, because it's 99% contagious, 99% fatal and basically scrubs the Earth raw to provide a clean slate upon which to tell the story they actually want to tell. Which is NOT the story of everyone dying.

Rather, Station Eleven is effectively about one family, that of Hollywood Superstar Actor Currently on the Downside of His Career, Arthur Leander (who I immediately, for reasons I'm not entirely certain of, pictured as current-day Harrison Ford) . We're using “family” loosely here, since Arthur is the typical Hollywood guy in that he's got a passel of ex-wives he doesn't have particularly great relationships with, a son he adores but who has been whisked away to Israel by one of those ex-wives so he hardly sees him, etc...

As the novel opens, Arthur is leading a stage performance of Shakespeare's “King Lear” in Toronto, doing the typical end-career thing of trying to add some gravitas back into his resume by performing one of the classic roles of all time. At the same time as the performance is going on, an Aeroflot flight from Moscow lands in Toronto with some passengers already dead and most of the rest of them, and the crew, getting increasingly ill. These folks are immediately whisked to local area hospitals, where they come into contact with exponentially more people. Who then go home and come into contact with...

...you can probably guess where things go with the superflu from there.

The contrast between life pre-flu and post-flu is one of the things I most enjoy about this book; most The End Of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) novels spend a few intro chapters about life before The End, and then the rest of the book is just what happens after The End. Station Eleven deftly flits back and forth chapter by chapter between:

The End, by which I mean the timeframe in which the flu develops, expands, and wipes out humanity. The book makes it clear that the reader is to picture this flu breaking out in basically our current time, 2016.
The Past, which is examined via flashbacks to various points in the life of Arthur that show how he develops as a person and forms these relationships with the folks we're going to be following through the superflu and into the terrible times beyond.
The Future, when the book flashes about twenty or so years past the flu's rages, to show us how things have shaken out for the people introduced into the other two time periods.
The contrast between Life Before and Life After is stark, as it must be. And Mandel writes about both sides with authority. One is immediately struck by the ease of our world when compared to what its collapsed version would inevitably be like; the chapters covering Arthur's rise as a Hollywood superstar is full of people traveling across the globe at the drop of a hat, an absolute lack of material want, and the vicious focus of too many people on Shit That Does Not Fucking Matter. In the Present Day chapters, she shows us how easily this would all fall apart. In the After Chapters, she provides a great sense of a world circumscribed, where the average person never travels more than a few miles from their homes in their entire life, where death comes often, randomly, for the young and old alike, in ways that just do NOT happen in our sanitized, softened, kinda ridiculous existence of today.

Indeed, the main characters of these chapters are notable for the fact that they belong to a theater troupe that travels around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare (if you can't see the tie here to what Arthur was doing himself when the flu hit, this book is not for you). They travel farther and wider than almost anyone alive at that point, and even they haven't gone a distance in their entire lives that a current American would consider more than a middling weekend road trip, at best.

I don't want to get too much into the detail of things here, because what I enjoyed most about this book was the slow and constant reveal of connections between all three eras and all of the characters that, at the start, seem to have absolutely no relation to each other, as well as what happens to everyone.

While the actual process of the flu expanding across the globe and society collapsing is covered well; Mandel doesn't REVEL in it like too many authors do. We find out how it's progressing via its localized impact on the key characters of the novel, or in background info THEY absorb via the Internet or news (well... while those two avenues of information are still functioning. SPOILER ALERT: CNN and Facebook don't last too long). She's VERY good at dropping the perfect one sentence of detail that almost catches your breath with the depth of horror it manages to convey about what's happening to the world.

The biggest difference between Station Eleven and most novels of the dystopian genre is that the violence that can safely be assumed to be unavoidable in such scenarios is present, but not lavishly glorified and slavered over, descriptively. Most of the violence is assumed and/or hinted at; the few action set-pieces are absolutely necessary instead of gratuitous. The single most-affecting act of violence that obviously shaped one of the key character's entire life is never even described; you don't need the gory details of what happened, you just need to know THAT it happened. I like Mandel's unwillingness to glorify and linger over the violence, to indulge the genre's usual trope of good guy vs. bad guy and capable ultra-violent hero vs. total bad dude... I find all of that just so goddamned tired at this point. MOST people are bad or good situationally; I don't know how I'm going to respond if society collapses and all of a sudden, say, a medication my wife needs to live is only available if I use force to take it from someone who has done me absolutely no wrong. I like to think I'm a good, moral person who wouldn't cause pain unduly, but how you define “unduly” is gonna shift when the chips are down.

In the end, Mandel weaves not just one, but a number of gripping plots that, in lesser hands, either would've each been its own book or, more likely, have been turned into one big unreadable, unfollowable mess. I could not put this damned book down, because there were so many things I needed to know the resolution to, and her writing just pulls you through page after page, compulsively.

For all of the negativity that this kind of setting and genre must involve, there is a surprising amount of lightness and hope in this novel, too. While acknowledging that a lot or even most people are going to be revealed as willing to do terrible things in the extremis of our entire comfy modern civilization collapsing, I think she's correct in also surmising that a lot of people will be able to realize that working together is going to be the only way for anyone to survive; that raw, brittlely-defended individuality may buy you a brief period of kinghood over the wasteland, but, if you want a world worth living in instead of merely surviving, you'll need to find ways to work with, care about and, eventually, love other people.

That's the sort of message I need to read more often, and I can't recommend this book enough because of it. It's just a great read.

Ancillary Sword is the middle volume of a three-book sci-fi romp that has garnered all the praise and awards (seriously, the first book took home the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke AND Locus. And it was Leckie's debut novel. That's some achievement right there), and the first book, Ancillary Justice, sure deserved them. I enjoyed that volume tremendously and was looking forward to this sequel.

Unfortunately, a lot of what I liked about the first entry is missing in the second. Breq, again our protagonist, was rather fascinating as a ship. Not so much as a human. Anaander Mianaai, a wonderful villain and concept (Near-Immortal Emperor of the big human empire who also happens to be at war with herself), is relegated to a brief appearance at the very start and some background mentions in passing otherwise. The completely alien and beyond-powerful Presger? Also almost entirely absent, except for a short stint as a Plot Device spent by the wonderful character of Dlique, their human-born but otherwise completely alien translator. Frankly, even the use of “she” for all genders (the Radch do not recognize gender in their speech, so the characters generally refer to everyone using female pronouns), which was a neat trick in the first novel, is more of a nuisance here, and actually set aside entirely in one scene where it would've muddled things up too much.

What we do get is a thinly-(very)-veiled morality play about Why Imperialism And Colonialism Are Bad. Most of the action takes place on Athoek Station and its namesake planet, both of which feature a colonial overlord class that lords it over the other races and keeps them oppressed. On the station, they live in the “Undergarden”, which is heavily and brutally policed, and completely unserved by the social and health services that exist for everyone else on the station. On the planet, the non-Radch are either plantation masters or the actual not-slaves-but-totally-slaves that harvest the tea that is the source of the planet's wealth. Yes, really. A sci-fi book that centers on tea plantations.

I'm seriously hoping we just had a bad case of Middle Book Syndrome here, because I'll be getting to the closing volume of the trilogy after a quick palette cleanse, but for now I am as disappointed in this book as I was impressed with the first.

Not the best history book I've ever read, but good enough to probably be my new default for anyone asking for a recommendation on something that covers Alexander the Great. The key hook feature Mr. Worthington adds to differentiate his take here is looking at both Alexander's AND his father, Philip II's, reigns, as flip sides of the same coin. I buy his argument that you can't really consider Alexander at all without having a solid grounding in what his father did first to set the table.

Proceeding from that, we get a decently-written, reasonably quick history of both reigns, with a focus on comparing the two to each other. The author's bias seems to lie with Philip II, favoring that ruler's propensity to enhance his kingdom vs. Alexander's propensity to enhance himself. Worthington makes a reasonably effective argument that Philip II was a better ruler due to the amount of time and effort he put in to making sure that his conquests were well-governed and integrated into his kingdom in a way that was designed to be lasting.

The book is most enjoyable in the Philip sections, for me, mostly because that's just a much-less-covered period of history. Alexander is basically history's first celebrity, and we have more primary source material on him than on anyone else until the Romans start getting weird. So, to anyone who's even dabbled in ancient history, his story is well-known, right down to the various disputes over what actually occurred at certain points in his life, but even those disputes and their various possible answers are well-known at this point.

Philip? Not so much; there's much less hard source data to work with, but Worthington does an admirable job of pulling together to story of his life and reign in fairly thorough details, noting properly when big gaps exist in the sourcing.

All in all, the book is an effective overview of the reigns of these two deeply-intertwined rulers, with an added bit of comparison that is more weighted towards the author's point of view than the straight history, but serves as a solid analysis of the differences between the two, whether or not you agree with the conclusion drawn. Follow this book with “Dividing the Spoils” and you'll have about as good of a layman's understanding of the entire Hellenistic Era as one would probably need.

This goddamned series... I am trying, and failing, to think of a series I've read in my life that started out so promising and then disappointed me so greatly. I'll be honest: I straight-up didn't finish this fucker.

To briefly recap: first book, YAY! Grand in scope, a galactic emperor at war with herself! The concept of gender does not exist for the main race wowzers, that's got some weird and interesting implications! Ships are people! Action takes place across multiple worlds and many decades!

Phew! THAT'S how you start a goddamned space opera!

Book Two! You've got... um... well, a LOT of talk about the class implications of tea pottery? Ship person is sad and distant. 90% of the action takes place on a space station that might as well be any current modern city on Earth, for all of how alien and space-y it is (isn't). The rest of the action takes place on what might as well be a 19th Century Indian tea plantation. There's literally not a single thing that happens on that fucking plantation or station that implies “SPAAAACE OPERA!!!!”.

The brilliant removal of gender as a language concept that helped make everybody in the first book actually seem alien? Now just an annoyance, one that is literally tossed aside at the one point in the plot where gender actually would matter. So why fucking have bothered in the first place?

That crazy mad space-empress at war with her own self? I dunno, she was absent almost entirely in book two and hadn't shown up in the first 120 pages of book three and I punted at that point.

So, then Ancillary Mercy picks up right where Ancillary Sword left off, with Breq, our putative protagonist, recovering from “her” boring injuries incurred in the boring conclusion to the boring second book. The Mad Emperor Mianaai may or may not have shown back up in the system, I dunno, they mention her ships possibly coming through a gate but they're a few weeks out from actually being able to interact with anyone and I didn't read the book long enough to find out if she ever actually shows the fuck up.

While we're waiting for the Space Lord to arrive and theoretically start some semblance of action, we must first read through another hundred pages of Thinly-Veiled Future Space Analogy To Current Day Racism and Classism That a Goddamned First-Year English Major Would Have the Decency To Be Embarrassed About.

That's where I gave up.

To be clear: I'm not opposed to Sci-Fi As Social Analogy for Current Events AT ALL; that's one of the strengths of the genre, its ability to cast current events into an interesting alien future in a way that possibly seeds some thoughts on how to deal with said problems now. And Lord knows there have been many very interesting takes on oppression, classism, racism, etc., done by many, many authors in the genre.

I just don't find Leckie's take on this interesting at ALL. She was going someplace wonderful in that first novel, but then scoped it down to something that hardly needs to be sci-fi in the next two, and then fails to do anything with the interesting premises setup in that first novel.

And that REALLY bums me out.

Leckie is still a pretty “new” author, this series started with her actual debut novel, and I wonder if she just ran out of steam on it. I can see having added a bigger conflict between Breq and Mianaai to the end of the first novel and just having ended the whole story there. Shifting to a whole new location for books two and three that, as of ~120 pages into the third, served NO purpose to highlight or advance the conflict between the various sides of the Lord of the Radch's personal meltdown war, just makes no sense. Particularly since that conflict was setup in Book One as the Primary Plot, the pivotal event around which all other events should be viewed in relation to.

I dunno. Maybe I'll finish the book someday, I can't have more than an hour or two left in it. But I am just so disappointed in where this series has gone; it's quite obvious that Leckie has got some stellar ideas in her head, she can do some solid if, so far, monochromatic world-building, but seems to struggle with fleshing out good base ideas into an entire series of books worth reading. I'll keep an eye out for what she does in the future, but for right now, I'm setting this aside.

This is Baby's First History of the Byzantine Empire.

I do NOT mean that as an insult. It is a stellar, one-volume history of the incredibly diverse, complex, and occasionally completely mystifying history of an empire that spanned over a 1000 years NOT including the near-half-millennium of Roman Empire that preceded it and that contemporaries did not consider at all separate from the latter empire we call Byzantine.

See? You're already confused.

I love the Byzantines and the Ottomans, so I read pretty much everything that comes out on them. As far as empires go, they're two of the most fascinating and complex to ever have existed, and, while well-covered in English, not exhaustively so like the American Civil War or World War II have been. A few years ago, I read both all three volumes of Norwich's canonical history of Byzantium as well as Osman's Dream, Caroline Finkel's excellent one-volume history of the Ottomans in the space of a few months. By the end of it, I was burnt the hell out on the topic, as much as I enjoy it.

When this smaller, more-focused and well-reviewed volume came out in 2009, I was still pretty torched on the subject, so I passed until recently, when it showed up on an Amazon search that, as they usually do, headed down the rabbit hole from my original search topic.

“Lost to the West” is a GREAT refresher for someone familiar with the topic but grown hazy on the details, AND it is what I would now consider the finest recommendation as a starter for someone who is interested but has little-to-no knowledge of the details of Byzantine history. When you're trying to cover 88 emperors in 352 pages, you have to have a judicious sense of what to compress or just cut out entirely, and author Lars Brownworth has done an excellent job in that. By focusing primarily on the emperors that really mattered, including a few that have historically been given short shrift, he is able to keep the story moving and the key details presented without getting bogged down in a way that would be inappropriate for a survey of this type.

Starting in the Roman era, naturally, with the rise of Constantine and his moving of the capitol to the tiny Greek town of Byzantium, we quickly move through the fall of the West and the real “birth” of the Byzantine Empire (even though the Byzantines called themselves Romans throughout, and did not see a clean break at any time, just a continuity of empire that spans an almost-unimaginable 1500 years), with the increasing loss of Latin as a language, the growing separation between the Church in Rome and that of the East, etc. The great peaks under Justinian, the losses to Islam, the increasingly smaller “recoveries” under the Heraclius and the Comnenus dynasty... these are all given their fair share of the story, with good amounts of detail on the economy and regular people, both of whom are essentially characters that played a larger role in Byzantine history than they did in the various contemporary Western polities of the time, which were much more “Big Man” focused due to their lower levels of development.

Brownworth goes out of his way to highlight just how different the Byzantines quickly became from their former Western brothers (distant cousins, at best, by the time of the Schism of 1054 that is essential to Byzantine history); the sections on just how awed the various western crusaders were by the majesty of Constantinople, which was larger than probably every urban city of Western Europe combined at the time, are well done, as is the contrast between the brutish, fist-first mindset of the French and German knights as compared to the more diplomatic, some might say “scheming” ways of the Byzantines.

Brownsworth takes pains to show that he disagrees with the modern usage of “byzantine” as synonym for devious, overly complex and designed to confuse and obfuscate... it WAS a complex empire, much more so than any other polity in Europe for many centuries between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance Era. As he repeatedly shows throughout his book, any emperor who tried to govern strictly through just brute force OR through treachery and diplomacy usually came to a bad end.

If there is a sour note in the book for me, it is the occasional reference to the Turkish conquests in Europe and of Constantinople as uniquely brutal or awful for the inhabitants of those areas because it was a Turkish race that was involved. I doubt the average peasant in Serbia saw much difference in being fought over by Turks versus being fought over by Serbs, Bulgars, or Byzantines themselves. The scholarship on the Turkish occupation of the Balkans has expanded greatly over the last few decades, and has shown that a more temperate interpretation of that period is probably more accurate than the past consideration of it as an unbroken stretch of enslaved darkness. Brownsworth pretty clearly still believes in the latter and, while it doesn't take central place in the book by any means, it comes up a on a few different occasions and I found the tone of it jarring each time.

That one relatively minor quibble aside, I won't be hesitating to recommend this book to anyone looking for a good summary of the Byzantine Empire, but probably would not refer those who are already well-versed in the area unless their knowledge has gone completely stale like mine had before I read it.

Ugh.

I used to really enjoy Harry Turtledove. He's the original “master of alternate history”, and his earliest works in this genre, such as “Guns of the South”, while kind of hokey, were generally taut, fast-paced thrillers that had decent plot hooks, some good twists and turns, and ultimately made for very satisfying vacation reads.

This level of quality even held through his epic “Worldwar” Series, which ended up spanning eight novels published over a full decade. This was probably the high point of his career, in my opinion.

His next grand series, The Southern Victory series, spanned FIFTEEN (sixteen, if you count “How Few Remain”, which you probably should) novels and, while not quite as good as the Worldwar run, still kept me engaged through to the very end. I definitely, however, was feeling some fatigue by the end of the run.

Now, anybody who's read his alternate history books (DISCLAIMER: I have not and do not read any of his non-alt. history stuff, so the magical/fantasy and plain fiction is a mystery to me, though I hear at least the fantasy series suffer from the same issue as his alt. history does these days) knows that Harry has a pattern when he writes: each chapter moves simply across the viewpoints of each major character, which, in his longer series, can run to a couple of dozen. It's a simple-yet-effective tactic that keeps the action moving across the various locales that need to be covered, and, in past works, I didn't mind this device.

HOWEVER... in The War That Came Early, the current series of which “Two Fronts” is a part... HOLY SHIT is this dragging. We're FIVE novels in, and nothing much of consequence has happened. Anywhere. The biggest twist [SPOILER ALERT] so far is that Britain and France, for about five minutes, decided to ally WITH Germany instead of against. This is AFTER they had already been at war with each other for a while.

Oh, and Poland has been Germany's only reliable ally so far. Really.

The end result of this MASSIVE PLOT TWIST has been to basically reset the entire goddamned war to where it stood in the first volume, with Germany and the Western Allies sitzkreiging in the West.

Oh, and the German/Polish vs. Soviet front? Yeah, that fucker hasn't moved in four novels, either.

I just don't get the essential point of this entire series: why does it exist? Worldwar was about humanity fighting back an alien invasion; that's a pretty great hook. The Southern Victory series gave us a world in which a smug CSA lorded it over a defeated USA, at least until the tide finally turned in the World War I analog. While the last chunk of that series, Settling Accounts, got a little too close to being a straight mirror of World War II, the sheer familiarity of our United States half-turned into a genocidal dictatorship carried it all forward.

NONE of these possible kinds of hooks exist in The War That Came Early. I had to look up the series on wiki to figure out how many books had been released and I'm frankly stunned that I've already read four and half novels in this series. Major characters have died and the impact on the plot and the reader has been “meh” at best.

And I think I know why.

In Worldwar and The Southern Victory, a large number of the major characters were, well, prime actors on the events happening. Worldwar had FDR, Stalin, the alien emperor, etc., all has primary characters that got their own chapters in Harry's “rotating chapter” methodology of telling a story. These characters were huge figures that made massively important decisions throughout the series, so those chapters riveted the reader and moved things along nicely.

Same thing in Southern Victory; Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, the southern Hitler... all got plenty of direct action and thoughts recorded in those books. You felt like you were privy to the major decisions and how they came about, and therefore were vested in how the plot rolled forth.

NONE of this exists in The War That Came Early. Five novels on, and every single goddamned character is some lowly shlub upon whom the action is just imposed, rather than them having any impact on it. The major plot points, such as “what the hell is happening in this war thingy”, are mentioned via lame, forced recaps of the “So I heard that...” nature between random pairs of Primary Character Shlubs and Some Other Guy We'll Never Hear From Again. The closest we have to the characters we care about driving the action are a British Sergeant who was kinda sorta close to, but not really part of, a critical group of political plotters, and a Internationalist sniper in Spain who manages to blow the head off of someone who was VERY important in OUR timeline, but ISN'T EVEN IMPORTANT IN THE BOOK'S TIMELINE.

I just... ugh. I've started/punted this book and the last one multiple times, and I'm dragging myself through it just because I hate buying books and leaving them unread, and because I have enough respect for Turtledove's past to where I hope he's got some huge fuckin' payoff planned for us at some point.

That said, it's going to take an awful lot of positive reviews of whatever he starts next for me to bite.

This book veers too hard between being two separate things:

1) A serious review of the practical reasons for, and implications of, a succession of basically “The South” sans Texas from the current United States and
2) An attempted humor book where a jackass Yankee crams as many juvenile (if often pretty fuckin' funny) jokes about the South as possible into the text.

Thompson doesn't mix these two disparate concepts particularly well, resulting in a disjointed read that could've been much better if it focused on one or the other.

Frankly, I'm surprised the author didn't straight-up get his ass beat multiple times on his journeys through the South, if half of what he writes as being true about his approach is accurate.

That said, I still enjoyed the book due to the insights it brings to the fundamentals of Southern culture that make it fundamentally incompatible with the rest of the Union (Note: I am a lifelong secular Chicagoan/northerner, and firmly believe that winning the Civil War was the dumbest thing the United States ever did this side of Prohibition). The reams of detail provided, and individual anecdotes that provide some emotional impact of various Southern ailments such as their segregated evangelical religious structures that dominate everything, the seeming hatred of public funding for education and its many and miserable effects on today's southern life, the “good ol' boy” nature of networked politics and business throughout the south, the willingness to union-bust and lowball northern states that demand decent employee protections from business... in this sense, the book is good. It provides a tidy sampler of the myriad issues that keep most southern states firmly at the bottom of almost every list of states ranked by achievement or quality of life, and why their odds of ever breaking these cycles are abysmal.

Thompson, realizing that actually kicking the South out is unfeasible, doesn't spend too much time trying to create a coherent argument for that happening. It just serves as a nice framework to discuss the various reasons why the south is so different and the cultural clash between them and the North so severe.

I and, I suspect, the book itself could've done without the repeated, jarring inserts of straight-up insults towards southern culture. Thompson seems to really want to establish his bona fides as a Northwest, Portland liberal who can't stand anything about the South, and it ends up overselling his case. We get it. Stories he digs up such as the black preacher showing off his donated-funds-bought BMW 7 series to his impoverished congregation, or a southern school district dominated by whites going WAY out of its way to close a high-performing black school just because it made the white schools look bad... those tales prove his point very, very well, without being larded up with gratuitous stereotype jokes.

The section on college football, even the author prefaces with “this is probably gonna be out of place but it's a hobbyhorse of mine so either skip it or enjoy”, I actually enjoyed just because it added some new info to my ever-growing list of reasons why ESPN should be destroyed.

Overall, a disappointing but still worthy read. A decent general pop survey/summary of the issues afflicting the South today that make it almost more of an enemy to the north today than it did in the 1860's.