Shawn

Excellent closing volume of an excellent trilogy. I expect this to quickly become and remain the canonical wide-view read on the American Army in the ETO of WWII. Wonderfully readable without sacrificing depth, Atkinson doesn't stint on covering the personalities, broad trends, and specific events that make up the almost overwhelming expanse of Western Europe from Normandy to V-E Day.

I hope like hell Mr. Atkinson is planning on tacking the Pacific Theater next.

does some quick Googling...

Jesus Christ. It's been twelve freaking years since this series debuted. We're also twelve books into it (plus one collection of short stories by mostly-other authors set in this universe). Annnd, as my review of last year's entry, The Golden Princess, showed, I struggle with why I'm still reading this series.

So I'm not going to spend much time on this save to say: it's better than the last book was. We get action, the plot moves forward quite a bit, we get to find out what happened to the greater LA area after The Change... it's a decent entry in a series that probably should have been put to bed two arcs ago.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm still reading it save for the fact that Stirling can knit a yarn pretty goddamned well, and I'm juuuuust enough of a sucker for “oh, we get to find out what happened to THAT part of the world after the Big Disaster?” that I'll put aside my inherent disdain for the increasing magical elements of this tale and bull through just for that.

Stirling is very, very good at creating and writing about alternate versions of our world (his Draka books remain my second-favorite type of this genre, juuuust barely beat-out by the downright depressing and therefore all-too-believable agonies of John Barnes' Century Next Door series...), and injects just enough of that into these books at this point to keep me grimly reading along, regardless of how many orbits my eyes have to do in their sockets at times when the fuckin' McClintocks and McKenzies have to argue over the trivial differences between their fake-ass dipshit clans for the 79th time...

Fortunately, The Desert and the Blade is a lot better than The Golden Princess was, given that Things Actually Happen in this entry. The High Princess' Quest is in full flower, and they get through a good chunk of it. Stirling seems to have realized that part of the draw of this series was finding out what's going on elsewhere on our post-Change globe, so he introduces some characters who have had reason to travel that globe, and therefore can spend entire chapters describing what happened elsewhere. It's a fun, showy example of just how good Stirling is at world-building, and I appreciate the appearances here.

I can't give much more detail without giving away reasons to actually read this thing, and I assume anyone even considering it is already familiar with the world because good fuckin' luck jumping in on Vol. 12 if you aren't. In a world where this type of book has been almost entirely taken over by Young Adult tropes (bleaugh), I appreciate that Stirling is still writing somewhat more adult tales of the apocalypse, his staunch advocacy of Renn Faire nonsense aside. It's far from his best book, but certainly the best this series has seen for a while, and further sets up the next entry to be pretty far-ranging and interesting to my particular tastes.

So, if you're into this series already, you'll probably like this. If you're not, this book will probably just confuse you. If you like to spend your weekends m'ladying your way through Society for Creative Anachronism meetings, who are we kidding, you've probably already written erotic fanfic based on this world.

As a Gen X tech dork who got into computers as the Internet grew up in the 90's, I'm genetically predisposed to liking Stephenson's novels. His breakthrough book, Snow Crash, which I literally got for free with a video game (Spectre VR, for the record), has basically been Usenet's favorite novel forever. And I've generally enjoyed all of the books he's written since.

Fall is quite possibly his most Stephenson-ian novel yet. It's got the world-building and future tech extrapolation that I consider his strongest strengths. It's got the iffy characterizations and wildly meandering multiple main and sub-plots that are his biggest weaknesses. You'd think, at almost 900 pages, that it also could've used a strong editor, but then, like most of his books, you ask yourself “what the hell would you have cut and still kept this even slightly coherent” and realize that the answer is “this book needed to be this long”.

I have no idea if he's explicitly said this, but the book seems to serve as a conclusion, mostly fitting, to the long run of loosely-related novels he's written about the Shaftoe and Waterhouse clans. It's also a direct sequel to 2011's README. And it's... hit or miss as to how well it does that.

The book is in large part an extended meditation on the nature of consciousness and what death means for that. Along the way, we get:
- a very trenchant analysis/satire of what the Internet is doing to people's ability to discern truth and how that might manifest itself in a near-future America (this was, frankly, the best part of the book for me)
- a not-very-successful reworking of Milton's Paradise Lost as a vehicle via which the concept of an afterlife that actually exists is considered
- a full-on Lord of the Rings-assed fantasy quest. No, seriously.

I don't think all of these pieces meld together very well, though the first one works extremely well as a stand-alone piece and I enjoyed that part tremendously.

The near-future imaginings are also quite good; his vision of Seattle 150 years out is very intriguing and has that Stephenson-ian knack of feeling quite plausible and believable. Dude does homework and doesn't just plop his first vague SWAG onto the page.

Where the book falls down for me is in the digital afterlife plot, which is unfortunately a pretty big chunk of the work. MILD SPOILER: if souls in the afterlife can't really die, as they're simply *NIX processes that auto-restart if terminated, all of the stakes are removed from any danger. Stephenson tries to engineer some exceptions and dodges (lol) around this primary fact he's established about this universe, but it doesn't really stick.

It also doesn't help that Stephenson isn't great at writing completely invented realities; he's at his best when things are at least tied to some kind of real-world analog. Given absolutely free rein, what he came up with here is... pretty lukewarm fantasy fare with a thin scum of extrapolated near-future tech janked in on top of it. It's a mishmash and it doesn't gel as a sub-story very well.

But, oddly... the endings aren't the main point of Stephenson novels, at least not for me. He's not known for sticking the landings, story-wise, but... I don't care. Even with the sub-par fantasy part making up a lot of the back nine of Fall, I enjoyed the entire journey quite a bit. I just didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as I did most of his other books. And I'm not just being “his early stuff was better”; Seveneves is my favorite work of his, and that came out in 2015.

I feel like he really, really wanted to express his thoughts about how human consciousness might survive in a post-human future environment, and a lot of the ideas he presents regarding that are fuckin' fascinating, but the story-telling analogy he decided to use to do that, just isn't successful.

I often feel like I have sunk-cost fallacy with my less-favorite Stephenson books; “I've already read 300 pages, might as well see if the next 650 change things around here...”. I don't regret having stuck through Fall to the end; the very very ending epilogue is particularly warm and sweet in a way the author is almost never successful at conveying, and a nice pin dropped in the entire Shaftoe/Waterhouse universe. I just wish the entire execution matched the ambition more than it does.

I consider myself pretty well-rounded in most areas of history, certainly more so than the average civilian. But I realized recently that, while I'm conversant with Irish history up to The Troubles, I don't know much about The Troubles themselves.

This is probably due to my general disdain for the Irish-American plastic paddy pro-IRA loudmouth that Chicago is lousy with, and was particularly lousy with when I was young in the 80's and 90's and The Troubles were still at full boil. The simplistic “fuck the British, Protestants suck, Catholics are saints, the IRA is pure!” narrative that dominates American thought about the era settled into my mind and I haven't been bothered to interrogate that until recently, even though I ambiently knew that my understanding was puddle-deep and probably mostly wrong.

So I was a bit stymied to find out that no one really seems to think a good single-volume history of The Troubles has been written yet. This particular book kept coming up though, and, having read it, I see why.

Say Nothing views the modern era of The Troubles (1969-today) via the lens of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38-year old, mostly apolitical widowed mother of ten, from her Belfast flat in 1972. Her life up to the disappearance and through the decades-long investigation into it is interwoven with the story of how the mostly-moribund legacy IRA was woken up in the late 60's to become fully active again and how it grew and changed throughout the conflict and its putative ending in the Good Friday Accords and since.

The McConville case ends up being the spine on which pretty detailed biographies of both Delours Price (early convert to the active wing of the IRA) and Gerry Adams (never-quite-publicly-admitted leader of the IRA during most of this time turned legit politician via Sinn Féin later on; gets most of the credit for bringing peace of a sort to Northern Ireland via The Good Friday Accords) are hung. Numerous smaller players are also brought into closer or further focus along the way, depending on their relationship to the McConville case and the bigger events that define The Troubles.

The book hooks the reader well, better than a typical straight history probably would, as it has this rather sensationalist criminal case at its heart. There's also a fair amount of reasonably exciting legal action around the very publication of this book covered near the end. That one also gets a fairly even, medium-detailed history of The Troubles, mostly from a grounds-eye level, is just a bonus.

That said, the McConville case IS the primary story being told here, and the further away a person or event is from the people directly involved in that, the less detail there is. Hateful bigot shithead Ian Paisley makes a couple of appearances, but there's very little coverage of, say, the Loyalists' beliefs and goals throughout the conflict, or much in the way of how the British government's policies developed.

So keep all that in mind. I'm purposely not going into any detail on the McConville case itself as that's the hook that will pull you through the book. Even if you don't care about The Troubles themselves at all, that case has enough twists and turns to keep the average true crime junkie fully engaged. Lastly, as somebody coming at this from a historian's angle, the coverage of all of the issues and drama surrounding the bulk of the primary sources used to tell this story was quite interesting to me as well.

Overall, Say Nothing gets my recommendation for anyone interested in The Troubles, and it contains enough detail that you can come in with next to no prior knowledge and follow along.

I am an absolute sucker for books that take place AFTER epoch-defending events/times end. I feel like the Big Events are all copiously-covered by historical literature; there's no shortage of books on World War II, the Roman Empire, the Civil War, etc. But I am much more interested in the codas to these events. Okay, cool: Japan has surrendered. Rome has “fallen”. Lee has knelt to Grant at Appomattox.Now what?The Tragedy of Empire tries to answer this question, at least as regards the fall of Rome, by starting in Constantine's reign, a decent consensus choice for “last high point of the Roman Empire”. We go from Rome's final peak through the absolutely tragicomic “fall” of the Western Roman Empire, that part ruled generally from some city in Italy (though not always Rome near the end; ‘sup, Ravenna?) and not the eastern-ish half ruled mostly from Constantinople.I was generally disappointed in this book. It is HEAVILY weighted towards a discussion of political, military and religious leaders and issues directly related to those topics; social, economic, and climactic factors, not so much. That's fine, there is certainly a valid story to be told discussing primarily the lives and actions of the leading military, political and religious figures of the day, but it's not the story I particularly want to read. To be fair, there are (very) short sections two-three times throughout the book that talk (very) briefly about socioeconomic factors, or the changing climate we now know greatly affected the Roman world during this time; that's good, but it's not nearly enough.But Kulikowski seems mostly interested in simply condensing and recording all that the primary sources have to say about the rulers through this time period. It does not matter if those rulers were good, bad, or barely noticeable; he gives the reader what is known about them. One might argue that it's not particularly important to capture in great detail the life and doing of some Roman “Emperor” from the 420's who was placed on the throne as a front by men of actual power, who did absolutely nothing while “ruling”, and who was summarily slaughtered in his bed after a glorious reign of a few weeks, but this book is going to tell you about him. His name was on a law promulgated somewhere once, and therefore He Matters.The book would probably be better for the more-casual reader if the author exercised any editorial authority on which rulers to just leave the fuck out, either due to there not being much primary source material about them or because they simply didn't do jack shit worth talking about. But, and all snark aside, this is a valid choice, I do believe Kulikowski expressly wanted to capture everything known about every leader of the era, good, bad or indifferent. In that, at least, he succeeds.If you like old school, Great Men Make History-style recitations of high-ranking individuals and what they did or did not do well, this book will be your jam. Everybody else would be vastly better served reading something like [b:Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe 8577980 Empires and Barbarians The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe Peter Heather https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1280328660l/8577980.SY75.jpg 6903116] by Peter Heathers for a great, modern, general overview of all of the factors that contributed to Rome's “fall” or [b:The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire 34427005 The Fate of Rome Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire Kyle Harper https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1496059228l/34427005.SY75.jpg 55532854] by Kyle Peters, for a view that specifically focuses on climate and health as primary driving factors of the fall. Actually, reading Kulikowski's book AND Peters' work would combine to give you a good understanding of all that went in, but the Heathers book combines all of that together in a well-written narrative that would be my single recommendation on the topic as a whole.

Weird book, for me. I read like a quarter of it two years ago and set it aside. Was feeling space opera-y so I got back into it this week and ended up finishing it and liking it more than that first quarter led me to believe I would.

I like the whole math/calendar concept, but I don't think it's fleshed out quite enough. It clearly affects the physics of this universe in a very fundamental way (duh, it's math) but I'm not sure I buy how it's presented. This random kinda nobody who becomes the protagonist is also an Einstein-level prodigy at this math. Somehow. And the brilliant general who is kept in a centuries-old mind prison with no body is able to figure out she exists out of the apparently billions upon billions of other people in this galaxy-spanning empire. Okay.

That said... there is some intriguing world-building going on here. The book reads very much like an extended prologue for an actual story, with a small-stakes plot that is setup for what will apparently be the much-larger stakes of the following books.

The tone varies wildly as well; the Kel, the dominant species(? polity? ethnicity?) of this big but not unipolar empire are presented as somewhat mindless automatons, at least in design. The various vignettes into the thoughts of what I would consider “red shirt” character/flavor-providers give a bit of a lie to this, however, as almost all of them are presented as in opposition to the dominant Kel ideology of rigid hive-mind “formation” thought. I'm hoping the next books in the series, which are out but I've yet to read, go into greater detail on the makeup of Kel society and how it operates.

I feel like the book does a great job of teasing/hinting at the world-building rather than ever being very explicit about it. The vignettes of the heretics' commo on the target fortress, the one-shot chapters of a side character's thoughts leading into, usually, something disastrous and fatal... a lot of info shows up there and I dug it.

What I'm worried about is the future plotting. This first entry shows us a pretty typical “evil empire uses brilliant but risky person to achieve evil goals, but brilliant person has a heart and secretly wants to overthrow evil empire” scenario but there's so much going on in the small details of this particular incident in the larger arc that it's engaging in a way that I can see the larger plot quickly becoming... not.

I dunno. The book took a while to hook me, but I enjoyed the details and hints at the interesting universe it's all set in, but I hope it doesn't devolve into a simple evil empire vs. democracy thing like it's hinting at so far.

But first, a brief digression...

I've read pretty much exclusively via Amazon Kindle devices/apps for 13 years now. I like having a lot of books on me at all times, being able to read wherever I am, in a pool, on a beach, in line at the store... I am the IDEAL Kindle customer. I have bought (god have mercy on my soul) 1206 books.
They know EVERYTHING IT IS POSSIBLE TO KNOW about my reading habits.

Yet... did I find out about this series from Amazon?

Nope.

“That's crazy, dude! Even though the collection features four authors you've previously purchased books by via Amazon? Three of whom you've purchased EVERY BOOK THEY'VE EVER RELEASED via Amazon? Wow!”

Yep! Totes true! Heard about this series from a buddy, in person.

Apparently Amazon has a whole bunch of these collections for various genres, each featuring legit superstars of the genre! A great idea, Amazon! And they're fucking FREE to me as a Prime subscriber!

Would've been great if you sent me an email or told me via the Kindle app that I'm in EVERY SINGLE WAKING DAY OF MY GODDAMNED LIFE about any of ‘em!

Anyway. God, the future is so fucking annoying.—

On to the short stories themselves. In the interests of this review not being longer than the collection itself was, I'm going to do this RAPID FIRE LISTICLE STYLE:

1) How It Unfolds, by James SA Corey

The author duo behind The Expanse gives us a short but very interesting examination of what it would mean to have many, many “you's” running around increasingly into a far distant future. The immutable issues of how vast space is become somewhat tractable if humans can be encoded as data and shot out that way.

And if those copies also keep shooting copies out further and further? Over millennia? What if the you from four thousand years ago could tell you something in a video that survived until you existed about a chance you should take with somebody you're also living with that they fucked up?

Ponderous!

A little hard to keep track of, but as ever, Corey excels at a bit of close-detail world-building married to an interesting high sci-fi concept. I liked this one quite a bit.

2) Void, by Veronica Roth

Meh. A fairly bog-standard murder mystery lightly leavened with sci-fi via it happening on a luxury cruiser that moves at a speed where like one year on the ship equals a coupla decades on either of the two planets it constantly shuffles folks between. Not a lot of there here.

3) Falling Bodies, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Somewhat interesting tale here (I'm interested these days in stories where the humans have already lost and finding our way in a universe where we're not the apex predator) but kinda lazily trope-y in its execution. Human baby is adopted by conquering alien elite figure and then a whole bunch of bog-standard racism and betrayal happens. I'd read a longer novel in this universe if it were more fleshed out and the plot actually had something resembling a hook in it.

4) The Long Game, by Ann Leckie

My favorite of the bunch. A small, simpler but undeniably sentient life-form on another planet is introduced to human capitalism in space. You can probably imagine how things go, but Leckie really makes this story interesting in the details of how humanity does its whole thing (huge military not really needed, just good ol' marketing, resource extraction, and labor exploitation, yay!) and in her characterization of the aliens. Very enjoyable, if also depressing.

5) Just Out of Jupiter's Reach, by Nnedi Okorafor

I liked this one quite a bit as well. The concept of “grown” spaceships that are bespoke and tied to their riders, but the ships kinda choose them based on DNA compatibility, so that you've got some real diversity in the characters here in a way that allows for a more-interesting-than-usual set of conflicts in the plot... all good stuff. Also, again, a sucker for the vampire specter of Capitalism just... staining every consideration of the actors. Like, these folks each stand to make 20 million Euro... but for FIVE FUCKING YEARS ALONE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM. Like, the info they'll bring back, the knowledge and data, will make the capitalists funding it TRILLIONS. It's a fuckin' rip job, honestly.

Nnedi worked that whole again very interestingly and enragingly, but also not as even a secondary plot point of much notice. It's just THERE, something everybody has to consider and deal with.
The sci-if, per se, was a bit weaker. The starships are cool as hell but there's a LOT of hand-waving and very little sense of risk in the voyage somehow. But the strength of the character-driven plot (again, not giving away much here because these stories are SHORT, just fuckin' read it yourself if you're intrigued) made that not at all annoying to me.

Props also for the very affecting side-story about the crabs. Man.

6) Slow Time Between the Stars, by John Scalzi

I've been on a journey with this guy. Loved the Old Man's War series. Liked the start of the Interdependency series, HATED the ending. Bounced hard off of everything else he's done. I had figured i just... middle-aged out of his stuff or something.

So color me pleasantly surprised that I quite enjoyed this entry. Humanity builds an AI-powered spaceship to go find other human-habitable planets. AI decides it doesn't give a shit about what humans want. Manages to utilize the resources of the universe to keep patching itself up for millions of years.

Not super-deep, but an enjoyable trip.—

Overall, I dug this collection quite a bit. Hope Amazon figures out a way to let me know about more stuff like this that it has sometime soon, I guess two decades of every bit of data about my reading habits wasn't quite enough! Someday soon, though, that plucky kid Bezos will figure it out.

I feel like Swan spends more time on the luscious maps at the front of his books and in whiteboarding all of the politics and descriptions of each minute province than he does on the story, and I am okay with that. It's some in-depth, hard world-building and it really makes the various races and polities, human and otherwise, stick in the brain while reading.

And the plot itself is pretty interesting, too, don't get me wrong. This is the first book in a sequel series to his prior Empire of the Wolf trilogy, set a few hundred years later than that trilogy and with the medieval setting replaced by a world now deep into the Age of Discovery and nascent industrialization. “What happens to magicks when the people get machines” is an interesting question, answered most successfully, to my tastes, by Joe Abercrombie's The First Law books. But Swan is setting himself up to at least challenge that opinion, if not overtake it.

The gist is that the afterlife, which in this world is a known-real/existing thing that everybody accepts as such, is... gone. More detail than that would really enter the spoilers realm, but it's a good hook to hang a trilogy on, I must admit.

Exacerbating things for our heroes is the fact that the first-among-equals polity they hail from, the Sovan Empire, has long since banned magick entirely outside of their military Corps of Engineers. So everybody who really knows how to even attempt to deal with this new aethereal crisis is either a foreigner (and you can guess how Sovans think of less-economically-advanced foreign nations and cultures) or a dissident.

Things go from there, with some truly creepy happenings as the mystery is investigated and whole new races and nations introduced on top of the known settings from the first trilogy. It's a fun romp.

If there's a weakness, it's with the characters. The Empire of the Wolf series was served well by being told entirely from one person's perspective well after the events actually occurred. While Helena wasn't the strongest-written character I've ever read, her mentor and the actual protagonist of the series, Konrad Vonvalt, was, and her narrating what he accomplished kept things moving and memorable throughout.

Swan has gone for a larger cast and shifting perspectives in this new series, and it works well enough, but isn't as strong a choice so far as the single-perspective of his prior works. Renata, Kleist and the others are good characters, but need more fleshing out than they get in this intro book. A lot happens to them, but the hows and whys of their reaction to events doesn't feel entirely natural yet. That said, the multiple perspectives are pretty much demanded by the world-ranging scope of this series. It also allows for more intricate plotting, and in general I felt more engaged with the multiple threads of this book than I did in the prior trilogy which, while good overall, felt plodding at times.

Grave Empire also suffers from First Book in a Series curse, in that it's largely scene-setting and ends hanging from a cliff. The book is entirely about defining the problem and the stakes that the later books will actually contend with. A hard problem to work around, and there's enough happening and shocks in the plot to make the book quite entertaining, but you know the whole way through that very little is going to be settled by the end of this first volume.

That said, I'm cool with some thick world-building and scene-setting for a nice long series to come. Swan's good at that stuff. And the plot feels like it will match the setting as well, which the first trilogy didn't quite fully pull off. Let's hope!

(Putting this on the third and final book of the series because spoilers but it's a review of the series as a whole, not just The Stone Sky)

I've never been a huge fantasy guy. Tried a couple of times to get into The Lord of the Rings as a kid; always bounced off within the first 100 pages or so. I've never read it, or seen the movies. Never got into D&D at all. Harry Potter, I've read not a word of nor seen even a minute of the movies. Game of Thrones, the books, I tried and got through like two of them and had to just bail. I do enjoy the show still, but the actual fantasy elements, like the Dragons and the White Walkers, are the least-interesting part to me. I prefer the politics and the personalities of the humans involved.

So, even though over time I've gotten a little more tolerant of Orcs and Dorks, it's still not really my jam. Which explains why I just got around to reading The Fifth Season this year instead of when it came out in 2015 and won every award for fantasy worth winning. A solid review from my friend Smeebs put it over the edge and I finally grabbed and started reading the first book of the series.

And here we are, less than two weeks later, and I've finished reading the entire trilogy. It's that good.

Even though it's considered firmly in the fantasy camp, there's a wonderful lack of the usual tropes; no dragons, no elves, and the world refreshingly resembles 14th-Century England not in the slightest.

Instead of all of that, we get a bracingly original set of conceits to revel in, many of which make the world seem thoroughly exoctic and foreign, instead of the more-typical fantasy trope of “like Earth, but older, with a touch of magic”.

Magic does exist in this universe, but in a more defined, important way than the usual “it just exists” manner we're more familiar with. It is generated by the Earth itself, and interacts with its inhabitants in different ways depending on what type of inhabitant they are.

And those inhabitants are a varied, creative lot. The main protagonist and many of the main characters are Orogenes; humans who can detect and manipulate the tectonic activity of the Earth itself. They can therefore unleash crazy amounts of hell in this hyper-tectonically-active world, and are therefore despised by the majority regular humans, called “Stills” by the orogenes for their inability to feel the near-constantly moving Earth. On the flipside, a properly-trained and/or powerful-enough orogene can also deflect or even stop earthquakes locally, which makes them very valuable, if they can be controlled.

Author N. K. Jemisin is VERY subtle about this, but she makes some inciteful commentary and analogies between how the orogenes (who are commonly referred to by the Stills as “Rogga”, a word that's basically the N-word of this universe) are treated in this world and how African-Americans are treated in ours. Again; it's SUBTLE. She does not beat you over the head with it, which is appreciated in a work of fantasy fiction. But there's some meat to chew on here. 

Orogenes are either bred by the ruling society in creches heavily guarded by, well, The Guardians, a wonderfully creepy class of overwatches/parental surrogates who have... complex relationships with their charges, or they are “feral” and only discovered as having their unique powers when, typically as children, they lash out with their uncontrolled powers in a moment of fear or anger and Everybody Dies. This complex interplay between utility, power, and threat colors every bit of their existence and relationship with the society they inhabit.

My favorite of the invented races in her universe are the Stone Eaters. Much of what they are besides the obvious feature you can deduce from their name would ruin the story, so let's just say that they're... super fuckin' interesting.

These races interact in a world where the Earth itself is basically ripping itself apart. Every so often, a cataclysmic event happens that fucks up the weather so bad the inhabitants call it The Fifth Season, and much of their cultural lore concerns how to just survive through these periods of horrific climatic and environmental upheaval. 

Even in between the Fifth Seasons, the planet is much more active than ours, and it basically prevents society from advancing beyond its essentially late-medieval level of wealth and functioning, even though there is much evidence of “deadcivs” lying around that indicates that, at some point in the past, their ancestors had effectively reached our own “modern” level of advancement. And even in calm periods, people have to prepare and set aside any excess wealth into storage to help them survive the next Fifth Season, which can strike at any time. 

The story has elements of the classic fantasy “quest”, but it's also more than that. It's a grand rumination on how a society chooses to function, the cost/benefit analysis that has to occur in moments of extreme strife and privation, and, most essentially, what makes somebody “human”?

On a closer level, there's an examination of what it means when a society's well-being depends on the forced labor of a specific subset of it. This is where the uncomfortable analogies to our own society are strongest, and, again, without spoiling anything, I like how the author covers this aspect. 

The hard part of reviewing a series like this is that the reviewer can't go too deep into the world or what happens without spoiling the journey, which I don't want to do. That said, let's examine a lot of the aspects of the series I found particularly rewarding:

The protagonists are mostly female. This is refreshing, and I don't give two shits what the Sad Puppies (Google it, I'm not covering these shitheads at any length here other than to say that these guys whine about any book that doesn't feature a white male lead, and go about their complaining in absolutely vile ways) have to say about it, and they've said more than enough. Morons.

Most of the “good” characters are brown. Most of the “bad” ones are white. Just by description; our world's color dichotomy doesn't exist in this one. Again, tough shit to whoever's feelings are hurt by this. It's good to not instantly feel comfortable and familiar with the protagonist of a novel, which is the default state of a white male reader of fantasy fiction. It's certainly more interesting, and isn't that something we WANT in our books? To be clear, the brown=good, white=bad thing isn't absolute, and this is not a universe where ANYONE gets through without making some morally dubious choices. But, from a purely literary standpoint, it's just fuckin' refreshing.

One of the dominant themes is the nature of parenthood, particularly in times of societal upheaval, that is not at all the norm for books of this genre. I like her examination of this, even if it often verges on absolutely heart-breaking.

There are elements of sci-fi as well, but only via the aspect of “ancient” civilizations having existed thousands of years before the book's present-day that were way more advanced than that present-day culture. This isn't a particularly original idea, but her treatment of it, is. 

I like that she doesn't go too crazy with inventing words to replace things that already exist and have names in English. There's a bit of that, which is just plain necessary to worldbuild and remind the reader that it's not our world this story is taking place in, but I like that even her invented words tend to be sensible enough to be immediately understandable by the reader. A child is a child, not a “birthling” or some dumb shit. 

That said, people and place names are wonderfully foreign but have their own internal consistency that is pleasing and believable. A lot of books fuck this up. 

Overall, The Broken Earth is an absolutely rewarding read. There's more than enough original ideas in the series to make it feel much fresher than most fantasy, many aspects of the series are wholly original, and the emotional flavor and impact are deep and not in the usual ways we are used to from the genre. Basically, if you're at all a fan of fantasy or sci-fi, you're a fool if you don't read this series. 

I think I'm a pretty fast reader. I don't claim to be a speed reader, because speed reading is bullshit and the people who claim they read 40 books a week aren't retaining jack shit of any of them but just trying to impress their idiot friends with a dumb stat, but I read at a pretty good clip and I devote a lot of time to reading every week. This book still took me a solid fucking three weeks to get through, and one of those weeks was spent on vacation so I was reading way more than usual.

At 904 very, very dense pages, What Hath God Wrought is a THOROUGHLY comprehensive look at everything about the United States from the end of The War of 1812 through the end of The Mexican-American War.

What it is NOT is: a pop history, on par with the usual “book version of a History Channel, Discovery or BBC show” that dominates the history section of Amazon these days. It is a proper scholarly review of the period in question, excessively sourced and footnoted, with a wonderful bibliography that alone will take you a day or so to properly digest itself.

What it is, is: a VERY good book. But it's also a commitment on par with, say, marriage, or having a child.

That is fitting with its role as Vol. V of the Oxford History of the United States, a series I've been working through for the last few years at one or two volumes per year, enjoying each volume very much so far.

The title comes from the “first” transmission over a telegraph line by Mr. Morse of Morse Code fame (though, as the book gets into, neither claim stands up to scrutiny), an event which illustrates the central them of the book: that the divorce of communications from physical transport revolutionized every aspect of American life in fundamental ways.

Howe illustrates this wonderfully with a discussion of how long it took a piece of news to get from, say, New York City to other points in the US at the time the book begins (1815). Even to get to nearby Philadelphia or Boston, a trivial hour or two jaunt down the ACELA for us moderns, took DAYS in 1815. There was no way for news to travel faster than a person verbally carrying it or a piece of paper with said news on it could physically cover the distance.

Howe takes us through this transformation wonderfully, explaining how it affected everything from where Americans lived to how long they stayed in one place, to the food they ate, to how they worshiped, etc.

Howe doesn't keep the focus just on the big actors of the day; yes, the politics and wars are covered quite thoroughly, but the author also is careful to spend a lot of time going over how regular people were faring under the decisions of the “important” figures of the era. Small vignettes from individuals who aren't as well-known as Andrew Jackson or Henry Clay are liberally sprinkled throughout the narrative to bring life and a personal touch to the grander themes being covered. As I vastly prefer comprehensive histories that cover social and economic factors along with the military and the political ones, this really helped keep me engaged through the very long read.

The second major theme of the book is a refutation of the common declaration amongst historians of this era as being “Jacksonian” first and foremost. While his bias towards the Whigs ideal of national economic development and anti-slavery is clear, it is also supported. Howe presents an argument that Andrew Jackson and the Democrats bear the brunt of the responsibility for driving America towards the future Civil War, as well as being generally bad leaders of the nation while in charge. The argument is persuasive.

Howe further does not shy away from bluntly stating that America under Jackson's rule and that of his successors was devoted to maintaining and expanding a system of white supremacy. It's hard to argue with his argument for this, and it's something that needs to be said and hammered home more often in the canonical histories of the era.

A lot of time is spent on the religion of Americans, which may strike the reader from this more secular age as odd, but Howe makes it clear that religion was a VERY dominant factor in almost everyone's life in this era. And it intertwined with many other aspects of life, such as how one felt on the slavery issue, women's rights, immigration, etc. The sections on religion are long and sometimes bewildering in the range of differences, major and not, that are discussed, but they are pretty essential to understanding how Americans thought about these things in those days.

The book closes with a fierce look at the American war with Mexico, which Howe positions rightly as one of the most impressive military campaigns ever waged as well as one of the least-justified wars ever launched. President Polk was borderline despicable in his machinations to maneuver Mexico into a war it didn't want for the sole purpose of aggrandizing American territory at their expense, with the primary goal of expanding slavery through much of it. The struggle of the Whigs to show their opposition to this war without actually defunding soldiers in the field will resonate with opponents of recent wars in our history.

Overall, while somewhat exhausting, What Hath God Wrought stands as a brilliant telling of the era, a bona fide classic of historical writing that anyone even remotely interested in the period covered should check out immediately.

When I was very, very young, the A&P was our corner grocery. Since we didn't have a car, we walked down to that A&P a lot. It quickly converted into a Butera and now is a Supermercado of some sort, but I remember the A&P logo on it most strongly.

When I mentioned I was reading this book to a buddy about 10 years younger than me, it was made clear that he had never even heard of A&P. Given that A&P was the world's largest company for 43 straight years, I find this kind of amazing. They were the WalMart of America for a very long time.So I grabbed this book when it popped up on my radar. In The Great A&P, Mark Levinson does yeoman's work in describing how A&P came to occupy such a domineering position and why they fell so hard, so fast, that adult Americans today can credibly say they've never heard of them even though there were thousands of A&P stores across the country in living memory.Telling this story is complicated by the fact that a) A&P wasn't a publicly-traded firm and b) the men of the Hartford family who ran it were notoriously private. Therefore, I can appreciate the archaeology the author had to do to bring this story to light with any level of detail.The rise of A&P in the late 19th and early 20th Century consumes the first half of the book, where the reader is given a lovely look into the frankly disgusting world of pre-refrigeration grocery selling. A somewhat predictable tale of effective utilization of economies of scale plus advertising mastery thus follows, with the rapid advances of transport and refrigeration technologies playing a strong role in the changeover of America's food shopping habits from being primarily conducted at tiny corner stores run by independent owners to the chain store-dominated landscape we're all too familiar with today.Where the book gets particularly interesting is in the government's rather persistent attempts to curb A&P's growth, if not destroy them outright. Thanks to one particularly stubborn Southern Congressman who made his nut latching on to the issue of chain stores being bad for America (just in case you thought idiot populism was something new in our culture...), A&P found itself fighting the Federal Government from about 1930 through to the Eisenhower presidency nonstop. And while I'm generally in favor of strong government regulation of just about everything (because almost all entrepreneurs are also raving psychopaths who should be prevented from having unlimited funds to push their agenda in all possible arenas but I disgress...), Levinson makes a very, VERY strong case that the government's arguments against A&P were entirely baseless from any economic or consumer-protectionist perspective.I enjoyed this book quite a bit, both for the history aspect of how shopping for food, something every person has to do on a regular basis, changed over time, with a lot of that change pushed by A&P's innovations in its own business in ways that quickly reverberated through all retailers of food in the country. I further enjoyed the bizarre history of the government's attempts to take A&P down for literally being TOO GOOD for consumers, by lowering prices too much. It's a clear case of the kind of almost vindictive government overreach that leads far too many people to assume that ALL regulation is bad, and is precisely the sort of thing those of us who believe in strong but careful government regulation need to look out for.The last bit of the book covers how, after finally putting the government's crusade against it to bed, mostly successfully, a change in previously-entrenched leadership quickly led to the rather rapid demise of America's largest chain. While those of us who have been living in the Age of Disruption (rolleyes*) are unfortunately used to seeing legacy industries with tens of thousands of workers suddenly go under in disturbingly quick fashion, A&P might've been the first to go through this process, and it did so before Silicon Valley was around with its life mission of murdering traditional companies for profit.

I would've liked for Levinson to spend more time on this process, but it's presented more as an epilogue to the story than an integral part of it. I guess it would be hard to spin a dramatic, engaging narrative out of bad managers consistently making wrong little decisions (and avoiding making any big ones) day after day for years until younger, more aggressive and more nimble competitors are eating your lunch and you go under.

So, in the end, I can recommend this book to anybody interested in the various topics covered within. It's a deep look at a by-gone era of American business and government, with a side order of weird, private bachelor dudes running a company together for many, many decades with very little in the way of outside input and doing it damned well. Levinson obviously saw something uniquely American in The Great A&P and told that story here well.

PROS:

- For a non-academic history, covers a topic/region that is severely under-represented in western literature, particularly when weighed against its historical importance.
- Well-written; not the kind of writing that inspires dreams of becoming an author one's self, but, for a history book, flowing and engaging enough to not put the reader to sleep.
- Situates what was going on on either end of the area in great detail so the reader can understand why the Silk Roads were particularly important at those points in time.

CONS:

- Is more of a history of Central Asia than it is of the Silk Roads per se; fails to really explain that there is controversy regarding whether or not a recognized “Silk Road” ever existed; some historians believe that the water routes through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea carrying the spice trade were always more important to the civilizations on either end than the Silk Roads were. I buy the author's argument that the Silk Roads were a very important transmission route for valuable materials as well as, later, ideas and new knowledge, but would've liked to read more about the opposing opinions that are out there.
- Goes overboard on situational detail at times; there are pretty detailed sections on, say, the progress of the German invasion of Russia in World War 2 or the development of religions in the Middle East that the author doesn't really tie to Central Asia and/or the Silk Roads except in the most vague “this big event happened sorta close to the area we're concerned with so here's 100 pages on it” kind of way.
- Related to the point above, I found the book not quite focused enough on the topic. I understood going in that it's a generalist history of the topic, but it could've presumed a bit more knowledge on the more well-known topics that occurred around the periphery of the Silk Roads and focused more on those events impact ON the area in question or how the area affected those events. There's a weird disconnect in his writing that doesn't tie his long digressions on, say, how religion developed in ancient Palestine to how the Silk Roads impacted that development or helped transmit it to other areas.

IN SUMMARY:

It's a good book. I feel it either could've been shorter, via cutting down the reams of info that are outside of the topic and could be assumed as already understood on behalf of the reader, or the same length but with a tighter focus on the area of study and/or with arguments presented against those who believe the Silk Roads importance is overstated to begin with. Still, given the paucity of good generalist writing on Central Asian history in general, it's a great starter for gaining an understanding of that region.

Hooooo boy... nothing says “light summer reading” like a history of Ukraine.

“The Gates of Europe” is a fairly traditional telling of the land and people that have, at some times, but not at others, been referred to as Ukraine and Ukrainians. I say “fairly traditional” as, while it's mostly a chronological narrative of events that occur over time in a reasonably specific patch of geography, Ukraine has not been an independent, sovereign state for much, nay, most of that time, and the people we today identify as Ukrainians often weren't in the past.

It's a bit of a muddle.

Due to Ukraine's anomalous status throughout most of history, its story is of necessity thickly intertwined with those of the other nations of which Ukraine has been part over the centuries. To his credit, Plokhy keeps a pretty tight focus on the Ukrainians and only brings in the Poles, Austrians, Russians, etc., as much as is needed to put the Ukrainian narrative into proper context. More importantly, he spends a good amount of time covering what each period itself thought it meant to “be Ukrainian”, going into detail on contemporary academic and literary trends and arguments that were completely unknown to the vast majority of peasants whose identity was being argued over. This detail spent on the arguments of tiny elites isn't, I'm sure, by choice; as ever with history, nobody cared to write down much about what the vast majority of people felt about these things at the time. So Plokhy is just working with what he has here.

The book covers well the various bases on which a putative Ukrainian “nationhood” has been claimed over time; religion, language, Cossack-ness, the ancient Kievan kingdom of Rus... part of the difficulty in writing a book such as this is that there is not, even today, any agreement that characteristics X, Y and Z being present in person A makes them a Ukrainian as opposed to a Russian or a Belarusian. There are diehard Ukrainian nationalists today who can only speak Russian, for example. Likewise, there are Uniate Church-adhering Ukrainian speakers who consider themselves fully Russian, and who would like their chunk of the nation-state of Ukraine to revert to the Rodina as soon as possible.

Plokhy does not place value judgments either way, an admirable locking down of whatever bias he may actually feel on the issue; it's a pretty dry, straight-forward narrative that does not push a belief that Ukraine is a unique, distinct culture/nation/person-type separate from Russia in any overbearing fashion. That he wrote a book about Ukrainian history in the first place makes his point of view clear; overselling the point would probably just turn the rather intense partisans on either side of the divide off from the get-go (a point which online reviews of this book make sadly clear).

I enjoyed the book, though I found Plokhy's studious devotion to detachment to have rendered it rather dry at times. There aren't many English-language histories that cover the whole of the Ukrainian story in one volume without including a lot of non-Ukrainian narrative, so I'm glad “The Gates of Europe” exists. If you just want to try and wrap your head around Ukraine's deal, you'd easily do worse than to pick this one off of the shelf.