Where Machiavelli Freaks You Out

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like most people, probably, I read parts of this in school at different times. I decided I should look at the whole thing instead of just bits, and I would say there are small rewards for taking the time to do it. Not enough for most readers, but you might want to.

It's not all that long, anyway.

Obviously, this whole essay-style writing is very Machiavellian, making it generally good advice only for people without scruples. It's not about being a moral person. It's entirely advice on how to keep yourself in power once you arrive there, and it is so practical that is also often deeply unethical and unprincipled, even straight up evil. The good of the people is not considered, because the people are not his audience, and a prince would only care about the people to the extent that it mattered to his continued success in controlling his princedom.

To understand how the author thought, the reader should conceive of the people in Machiavelli's writings the same way we would normally consider animals on a farm. They are possessions or tools, a means to an end, a way to be wealthy and powerful. Their good only enters into the equation when or if it supports the prince and helps him maintain control over his lands.

"A prince wishing to keep his state," he writes, "is very often forced to do evil." (Isn't that the kind of thing sociopaths say? You forced me--I didn't want to do that.) Sure, make them love you if you can so that they cooperate with you, so they don't rise up, but don't hesitate to destroy enemies and malcontents in a way that terrifies others. He also says that the prince "cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion." That's pretty bad, doncha think? He has practical advice on how to do this, and in the abstract it sounds like advice on weeding your garden, but when you think about it any deeper it is beyond disturbing.

He didn't care. He wasn't writing for you or me.

What I was most surprised to realize was that he was very well informed and educated, more than I thought. He uses examples from the history of Rome, ancient Greece and Persia, and all of Europe at different stages of history. He knows historical details about campaigns and leadership styles and a lot more, giving his arguments a pretty good basis in fact. The style, though, is kinda goofy. It's all written like a flowchart: "you could take power this way or that way; if the first, you might do a or b; if the second, c or d; if you want to achieve X, you can do Y or Z; if Y, this or that might happen..." It feels like a simplistic view of personality and causality and possibility, as if everything breaks into two or three simple categories, each with its corresponding series of action that will lead to success. However, I like this for one reason: he is pushing back against the medieval/Renaissance belief in fate, the wheel of fate, the way people are brought up and then cast down and there's nothing you can do to alter that. He thinks you can act to decide your fate, and I prefer that as a philosophy.

Near the end, he addresses the practicality of that belief in the face of reality, where unforeseen events can change history. He admits that there are forces beyond our control, but fate or fortune isn't wholly in charge. He says, "I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less." He talks about a flooding river that can carry everything away despite anything we do, but argues that we can prepare for floods and mitigate their harm the next time. Not bad advice.

As much as anything, I found it interesting to see how people thought 500 years ago. The Prince isn't terribly amusing on its own, just for pleasure reading, but his first-person essay and advice does answer some questions about our ancestors and the way they saw the world. And it reminds a modern person why we want to limit the power of elected officials and others. Don't give them the chance to put Machiavelli into practice.

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Where Edward III Has Some Folks to Fight

King Edward III by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hey, this was a good read. (No pun intended.) Elizabethan plays can be tough, but this was not that bad, and very entertaining. I liked it. 5 stars.

It's one of those "Did Shakespeare write this?" plays that has more recently been a "How much of this did Shakespeare write?" play. Something like half, maybe. Hard to tell at this point. But in my head, and according to educated critics who have used a lot of methods to analyze the language and style, this is essentially a Shakespeare play. With assistants.

Being a history, the play is pretty episodic. It starts with Edward putting down a rebellion on the Scottish border, where he pressures a beautiful countess to sleep with him until she shames him enough he apologizes. Then, we pass to France, where he is pushing his claim to the throne. There are a couple battles--Crécy and Poitiers--where his son the prince survives and succeeds against great odds a couple times. He takes Calais [historical spoilers!], where he really wants to commit some atrocities but gets talked out of it. The captured French king is brought to him as they enter the city.

I found it fun to read and imagine it would be pretty great to watch. It's too bad it mocks Scottish people in the beginning, because that made it unpopular when James I became king a few years after it was written and first performed.

As history, this has flaws. Events are moved around and historical figures invented. Some of it's true, but it isn't very accurate. And some critics say it isn't up to Shakespeare's standards (for reasons that don't trouble me). But it is a play meant for spectacle, for patriotic fervor, for emotional reveals (like when the prince survives one more tough spot, even though the people already know he survives) and that would make it a high-energy play to see. It's very dramatic.

Seriously--go to school or read a history book for history. Go to the theater for drama. And this is good drama--IMO, always.

Recommended.

Oh--the notes and helps in the front and back of the Melchiori edition from Cambridge are very good. That's a bonus.

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Where Dan Models True Scholarship

The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues by Daniel McClellan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is such a great book. Highly recommended. And not just for people interested in the Bible or the history of religion--but definitely for those guys, as well.

Dan is one of the best things to happen to the world during COVID. He has a wide web presence, but I know him from TikTok, and he's amazing over there. Everything he brings to this wide discussion on social media is present in this book, which is why I love it.

First of all, the topics here--whether god lies in the Bible, whether he had a wife in the Bible, what the Bible "says" about abortion or rape or Satan, and so on--are interesting to many of us. Even non-religious people are affected by the beliefs people hold on these topics, by the arguments they make about them, by the policies they support or oppose based on these beliefs. And for someone raised in a religious tradition, discovering that many things I thought were so were not so, actually--well, that's like finding a secret room in your attic or something. Surprising. Exciting. Strange. And Dan nails these topics, presenting amazing evidence from a wide variety of sources to support his positions.

But when you get down to it, the central theme of his writing is always "Data over Dogma," and that controls everything he puts out. It's not just "prove your point with better examples than the other guy;" it's more like "amend your belief to correspond to what is demonstrated by scholarship, whether or not it matches what you were raised to believe." Combined with that, he shows great restraint in his rhetoric, very rarely employing sarcasm or negativity even when *ahem* we all feel like he could. That is because, I think, he deeply believes in the worth of persons--even people he absolutely disagrees with. And in all his videos and writing, at every step, he demonstrates the way we might move forward in our divided culture if we agreed to interact in a more elevated, careful way. Showing respect to people he disagrees with is a powerful example. Standing with the disenfranchised and marginalized instead of the entrenched powers when the data is ambiguous is another. Taking care in his language to avoid offense is another. Dan doesn't want the conversation derailed by unkindness or anger. People come after him, but he doesn't take the bait emotionally.

Instead, he writes a great book.

There are surprising, fun things in this book. There is a ton of amazing research (from many people) and the best modern scholarship, all centered on exciting questions that I wanted answers to. All of that makes it worth reading, without doubt. The content is fantastic. But the example he sets here (and in regular life) is probably the bigger reason to look at this book. This is how academics should work. This is how we should talk to each other. This is how we incorporate new information into our lives, even if it contradicts things we always believed.

Highly recommended.

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Where Suleiman Can't Trust Anyone

Suleiman the Magnificent - Sultan of the East by Harold Lamb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love Lamb's historical retellings/novels/life stories/biographies, but this one is a little less dazzling. It starts great, but it gets less and less compelling through to the end. Still pretty good, still pretty easy and pleasant to read, and worth the time, but not as fun as others.

Lamb writes hybrid books, ones that could be novels or biographies or something else, and I like the novel type most. This starts that way and then slowly turns into a biography. The last 30 pages are about developments after Suleiman's death, which was the hardest and densest part to get through. but for that part, I would have probably given this a 4.

Lamb does an amazing job popularizing the history of figures and places that are usually given too little coverage in American history classes and media, and I give him a ton of credit. His research and writing are excellent. I definitely learned a lot about Suleiman and the way the Ottoman Empire expanded and threatened Europe during his lifetime. It answers a lot of questions I had about that time period. And, as always, it's a pretty good read.

I just feel like this book, if he had novelized it a bit more, made it a little more like some other biographical novels of his I've enjoyed more, it would have worked better. As a biography, it's fine.

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Where Constantinople Falls

The Prince of India or Why Constantinople Fell by Lew Wallace
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was an amazing book. Two volumes--over 1000 pages--lots of characters and settings--and it was entertaining throughout. I loved it.

These are my thoughts--bit of a jumble:

There is a sort of quirk about the book. The main character, the so-called "Prince of India" is a figure from legend known usually as the Wandering Jew, a man condemned to long life for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. He's an interesting character, a brilliant man who wants to end religious strife, who travels the world, learns languages, makes himself wealthy so that he can have access to important people, and espouses a sort of unification of religion. Though he does some awful things before the end of the novel--causing a deadly fire before helping the Turks defeat the Greeks--most of the time I found myself very sympathetic to him, particularly as he tried to get the leaders of Islam and Christianity to recognize their connection, their mutual belief in a loving god. He reads like a sort of Gandalf figure, or some other wise man who is endowed with a little supernatural ability. (He's immortal, rich, intelligent, and a capable astrologer. He's not magic, exactly, but he can do some stuff.)

From time to time, the author's overt support for Christianity comes through, rather like you find in Quo Vadis or similar novels (which I also liked, actually), but it's generally no more overt than most Regency or Victorian literature, for example. (We don't get any readings from Fordyce's sermons, thankfully. And we don't get a Jane Eyre preparing to go preach Christianity in India.) It's mostly a romance like Sir Walter Scott or maybe Dumas, with action across Arabia and Syria and, especially, Constantinople, with hidden treasures, sailing ships, war, and abducted maidens who need to be rescued.

The sultan's best friend, Mirza, the best warrior in the story, is the heart of the second half of the novel. He is a loyal fighter who was stolen from his home in Italy as a baby. He is sent to the city as a spy where he is intended in part to gather information for the invasion, but he's tasked even more with the job of watching over and protecting Irene, the beautiful cousin of the emperor. (The sultan previously traveled to her home, disguised as a storyteller, and fell in love with her, intending to marry her.) Mirza falls in love with her too and starts to rethink his identity, taking back his name and title as Count Corti. When the friends meet again, both men pledge to protect Irene, no matter the outcome of the coming war. (They honor this pledge, and in the very end the sultan marries Irene while the count returns home to the mother who never stopped searching for him, where he discovers the sultan has long since paid to rebuild their home and restore their fortunes. But that's a spoiler, so shhh.)

There are about 10 really great characters in this novel, any one of whom should have their own book. Sergius, the idealistic Russian monk, might be my favorite. Irene, the iconoclastic and stoic noblewoman, unbowed after long imprisonment, and who refuses to wear a veil as honest women were expected to do, is admirable and captivating. Lael, the young Jewish woman adopted and educated by the Prince of India, is sweet, and the wealthy Demedes, the epicurean son of a courtier who abducts her and hides her in a cell floating built in the giant underground cistern of Constantinople, is a great villain. The African servant of the Prince of India who helps Sergius find her and free her is a a cool character, too.

The novel concludes with the siege and capture of the city. It's a great retelling, stretching over many packed chapters, all given from the POVs of characters we care about. Very affecting. Very informative.

I enjoyed this from beginning to end, and even though I don't align with the author's central religious belief, I applaud his ecumenical philosophy, the one he gives mostly to the Prince of India and, in some measure, to Queen Irene and the monk Sergius. It's surprising in a novel like this, published in 1893, and I give him some credit. Lew Wallace is better known for Ben Hur, and now that I've read this one I realize I need to read that one, too.

Very good writer. Highly recommended.

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Where Thomas Fights the Battle of Crecy

Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very well constructed historical novel set in the time of war. I liked almost everything here.

This is the third novel by Cornwell I have read, and I'll admit it took me this long to adapt to his rhythm, to learn how to follow his prose. I liked but didn't love his writing at first, finding it quite a chore to follow what was important and not focus on the rest. I didn't feel like I was working as hard this time.

Set during the 100 Years War, taking place mostly in France, it tells about Thomas, a young English man in a band of archers. Much of the story is about fighting smaller battles, looting, tearing up the countryside, coming into conflict with fighters on both sides of the war, but it ends with full retelling of the Battle of Crecy. (I didn't realize until recently that I conflated Crecy and Agincourt, constantly thinking I knew something about one that turned out to be true about the other. Much clearer in my head now.) :) It's very well done. Cornwell has a knack for telling a story from two perspectives: a narrow, personal one, and a larger, bird's-eye one. Most of the big battle is told from Thomas's perspective, but we see how the whole thing unfolds. It reminds me of Waterloo as recounted in Les Miserables, and though it's not as extensive as that one--thank god--it is still a massive set piece that the whole novel is building to.

Thomas has other goals besides just surviving. He is searching for a relic stolen from his home town, and also wants to get revenge against the man who killed his father. He has also fallen in love with a French woman he protected, so he wants to take care of her as well as her family. These goals are sometimes conflicting, and added to that is the personal enmity of an English nobleman who hates Thomas.

Cornwell handles all of these conflicts, twisting them together, letting the pace increase from beginning to end, keeping all of them in mind. It's well done, very entertaining, and I enjoyed it. His careful scholarship regarding Medieval fighting as well as history in general give the whole thing genuine verisimilitude (which I apparently can't spell but can appreciate). The ending works well, and though a lot is lost, because this is a violent story, we are still left with a sense of hope and a hint of happiness.

Recommended for readers of history, especially military history.

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Where I Still Have Questions

In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth by J.P. Mallory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very useful book, excellent for those with a particular interest in the topic and more than a little expertise.

It's a little less useful for people like me--a history enthusiast without specialized knowledge. That's why it took me many years to finish. I read about a third of it probably 20 years ago, then read the rest in bits over the last several months.

It's actually great, though--definitely a 5-star book for information. I expect it's assigned for use in college history or linguistics classes, or it should be, because it's dense with facts, theories, discussions of competing models and the like. The author has a perspective, and occasionally has sharp criticism for poorly supported theories, but I feel like he does a good job weighing and analyzing the ideas of other researchers, giving them their due even when not fully convinced.

The fact that Indo-Europeans, as they spread into settled agricultural areas, came in like an ox-drawn wagon in a china shop, was kind of a surprise to me. I always assumed many of those areas were sparsely settled at that distant time, though I guess I hadn't considered it too deeply. Finding out that these folks were so disruptive to regions that were more advanced in many ways, taking a lot of material culture backwards, is pretty disappointing. What civilizations might have sprouted if they had been left alone? What languages would be spoken? What literature might they have produced?

The final chapter tries to describe how the spreading Indo-Europeans might have pushed their language into so many parts of Europe and Asia without necessarily displacing the natives, maybe without even outnumbering them. (Kind of like the way Norman French was imposed on England, despite the native English speakers greatly outnumbering the invaders.) It's interesting that there are a couple vectors for that, including the idea that, in good years, herders can produce a great deal of wealth quickly. That made them rich neighbors on the one hand, giving them power in that area, and also made their lifestyle, being conducive to upward mobility, enticing to local agriculturalists, encouraging them to join up. Both of these things bolstered the intrusive Indo-European language at the expense of the more numerous native people and their original language.

Anyway, those are just a small part of the topics I found interesting here.

Most of the text is at a pretty high level, though, and seems to presuppose a pretty decent grounding in the basics of the subject. Or, if the author isn't presupposing that, he does a poor job of reaching the average reader. (Me. I'm the average reader.) In parts, I mean, not everywhere. There are some parts of chapters that are very clear, informative, and full of exciting information, and I enjoyed those a lot. The tougher parts took more time but still had nuggets worth digging out. What I wouldn't say, though, is that this book is a decent example of popularizing specialized information. It isn't really. (Experts who ARE good at that, IMO, are John McWhorter and Steven Pinker in linguistics, Richard Dawkins and Sean Carrol in genetics, and Reza Aslan in religious history. They make the content very accessible for a broad audience.) It takes a lot of energy to get through this, and I wish more of it had been organized for readers like me.

Still, there's a lot to like, even for readers without expertise, because I learned a whole bunch, and for better-informed readers there's even more to like. And if you want to read parts and skim others, you might like it even better than I did. But it's not really a book for the casual reader.

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Where Coriolanus Sabotages Himself

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a tragedy (spoiler right out of the gate!) and I really don't like tragedies. Whatever sympathetic magic it is that works on some people, giving them a dose of catharsis or some pleasing schadenfreude, it just doesn't work for me. Teaching Othello to my students year after year, period after period, was a kind of torture--he made the same stupid mistake every time we read it, and the sweet Desdemona died every. single. time. Brutal. Depressing. Discouraging. I hate that story.

(That experience will probably be my villain origin story. I'm gonna go around rewriting the ends of all the Shakespearian tragedies, giving each one an implausible happy ending, thereby incurring the wrath of literature lovers everywhere and making my name a hiss and a byword.)

Anyway, the point is that I actually liked this play. Or I should say, probably, that I liked this story. I didn't expect to. I expected to hate it and curse it like I do the other tragedies. (Still hated the end, of course. But if I squint I can pretend the last page is missing and everything turned out great.) I'm still sorting out why.

The intro discusses the fact that this is seldom performed, being staged far less often than many of his other plays, and one reason is that there is almost no one to root for. The characters aren't very sympathetic, especially the MC. Coriolanus is selfish and proud and eventually turns traitor; his mother is a hardcore stage mom (I picture a tough-talking Diana Rigg in this role); the common folk are ungrateful; the patrician leaders are all self-serving; and the enemies are... well, not Roman. And while that's all kinda true, I still feel like they're all interesting and well-drawn.

One of the most interesting themes in this play addresses the question asking what political leaders and the people owe one another. I kinda side with the people here, not trusting Coriolanus to protect their rights, but I get it that they aren't crediting his heroism that saved them from death and slavery. At the same time, Coriolanus and the other leaders are proud of what they do for the city, but then treat the people--the overwhelming majority of Rome--like they're nobody and unimportant. Coriolanus is the worst about this. My dude, they support you. They do all the work. They are Rome. What a jerk.

But my favorite part is where he's questioning the utility or necessity of the tradition where a hero standing for public office must go out to the people, acting humble, showing off his scars earned in their defense, begging for their support, and he just doesn't want to do it. He wonders to himself if respecting old norms and customs without thinking about whether they should still have a place in modern life risks filling their culture up with meaningless or even harmful traditions:

Why in this wolfish toga should I stand here,
To beg of Hob and Dick that does appear
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to't.
What custom wills, in all things should we do't
The dust on antique time would lie unswept
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to overpeer.

In a culture (I mean English culture, but it could just as fittingly apply to Roman culture) that has such reverence for custom, it's refreshing to see someone questioning the continuation of some random old tradition. It's unfortunate it's in Coriolanus's mouth, though; he's not a good spokesman for mixing things up.

Coriolanus is a hero; nevertheless, he's exiled because he refuses to satisfy the people that, once in office, he won't take away their rights; he defects to Rome's main enemy, who happily put him in front of troops to go fight Rome; he defeats his own homeland for them; but then he concludes a peace treaty (at the request of his family); this infuriates the Volsces people, who kill him.

Tragedy.

Aufidius, who plays Hector to Coriolanus's Achilles, Salieri to Coriolanus's Mozart, is an interesting character, and I wish he got a little more attention, a little more time on stage. Ultimately, after the events here, his people get swallowed up by Rome, but in the course of this story, he's probably the most honorable character. He never stopped fighting for his people, and he sure was able to think outside the box. I'd like to see his story.

In any case, it's an entertaining play, despite my misgivings about sad endings. Or maybe I just liked it because the introduction said I wouldn't. Maybe.

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Where Fox and Willa Cross Italy

The Last True Templar by Boyd Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This second book in the series, another collaboration between brother and sister Boyd and Beth Morrison, is a lot of fun and a solid historical mystery/adventure. Four stars. Maybe 4.5.

It's another take on the lost and hidden Templar treasure, but it feels fresh just the same. The characters are likable (which I care about, yes) and the conflict is something that feels like it matters, making me eager to see Willa and Gerard reach the place and do the thing. Their happiness and the happiness of people around them is important enough to care about and root for.

Beth Morrison is an actual historian, which makes the details of the times not just accurate but compelling, helping sell the world-building to immerse the reader. And Boyd Morrison is an amazing story-teller, one who knows how to keep on-the-edge-of-your-seat tension going throughout the novel. There is no letup, no relaxing. They are metaphorically chased up the tree and attacked with rocks until the last page of the story.

In fact, that's my only criticism of anything beyond quibbles. Keeping the pressure on the MC's, making it so they are never, for one moment, able to take a free breath makes you keep reading. Ya gotta know if they get through it. But it also stresses me out. I need a breather here and there.

That's just me. It's not an actual flaw in the book, at least not how most people see it.

Anyway, I get a breather at the end of the novel, and it's a satisfying end, leaving me eager for the third book.

Recommended.

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Where the King Hides in a Tree

Boscobel, or the Royal Oak by William Harrison Ainsworth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I like this a lot more than the average reader. That's okay.

I found it really interesting. It's the story of Charles II, trying to retake the throne from Oliver Cromwell after they put his father to death. The first section of the book deals with the loyalists' preparations for a battle at Worcester and the subsequent loss to the "roundheads" of Cromwell. It's well done, full of spies and skirmishes and stratagems, individual heroism and unexpected reversals. Cromwell, in this part, is as important a character and as interesting a character as Charles.

The rest of the book deals with Charles trying to escape after the loss. It's very complete, with lots of heroes. (While I'm reading, I'm rooting for Charles and his loyal supporters. I don't actually care about the monarchy, then or now, but in the books they're the good guys for sure.) There are so many close escapes, so many moments when the troops searching for him almost find him. He goes from house to house, from hidden room to hidden room to hidden cellar, from one woods to another, two or three days here, an hour there. It's pretty exciting, in its way. It's the biggest game of hide and seek I've ever heard of, and Charles won.

He almost takes ship a couple times but can't quite make it work. He pulls off a disguise now and then, and other times it fails him, and he has to fly again. Of course, in real life, he went to all these places, including the huge oak tree that he famously hid in, and eventually got help to escape to France before being ridden down.

I liked it. I thought it was fun, a good book for those who like this sort of romance (action adventure romance, not HEA kissing romance), though it might not work for everyone. It has a lot in common with romances that Dumas wrote, with constant plans and schemes and fleeing on horses and the occasional sword fight, so it might work for some of his fans. (Like me.) It's also suitable for those who like complete descriptions of manor houses and moors and harbors and villages dating back to the 17th century. Ainsworth is precise about details and doesn't stint on that stuff.

This was first published in 1872. I think this edition I have is from 1899. Old enough, anyway, that someone sold it at a yard sale for 19¢. :)

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Where Westerners Can See The Islamic World Through Their Eyes

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4 stars. This is a very good, very useful book of history.

I'm a little disappointed it isn't quite the book I thought it was. But that's sorta my mistake, because it does what it sets out to do.

Lemme explain.

This is, essentially, a history not just of the Islamic world, but a history of that region from the perspective of the Islamic world. That's great. That's most of what I hoped for. The author, as a highly educated man originally from Afghanistan who lives in the US, is a knowledgeable historian and excellent communicator, and the book succeeds as a history for Westerners from another perspective. The concluding chapters, with the history of the last 100 years or so, is especially well done, filling in information I didn't get from other books of this type.

I just thought from the title and the blurb that it would focus on the part that really perplexes me--how, following the Medieval period, did the most advanced, most civilized part of the world, with the biggest cities and the greatest wealth, fall off so much that modern Europeans and Americans (during the 19th and 20th century, for example) could look that direction and think that *they* were uncivilized? What happened to the poets and the scholars and the scientists? The doctors? The explorers? Why wasn't the stuff that ended up giving the West such an advantage over the last 150 years or so invented and built in Egypt or Iraq or Persia instead of England and Germany and the US?

It's not totally missing from the book. Some of that is answered, more or less directly, but it's brief. I was hoping for a much closer look at the Medieval era and the changing fortunes of the West and the Islamic world. So it's in there, but as this really is a survey of history from the 600s to the present (with a short chapter on much earlier history) there isn't a lot of room to focus on what I thought was the central idea of the work.

To be clear, then: this is an excellent history of the Islamic world, told in a clear voice by a knowledgeable educator with lots of helpful, unique insight. I found it very informative. However, IMO, the main title--"Destiny Disrupted"--refers only to a small part of the whole, one of many themes, while the subtitle--"A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes"--is much more accurate in terms of content.

If that's what you want, you absolutely should read this book.

If you were hoping for something different like I was... you still should probably read it, and just be slightly disappointed, because it's still pretty good.

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Where They All Are Horrible People

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I find this so tedious. Probably my least favorite Shakespeare play.

There's just no one to like in this story. Cleopatra is horrible, the most spoiled, narcissistic, useless character since Iago. Antony is an unsympathetic, selfish fool. Lepidus is useless. Caesar is no better than the rest. I literally don't care who wins and who survives in this story.

My Roman Empire is how stories set in the Roman Empire are dry as dirt.

Everyone here is fighting for a huge empire, for riches, all while holding on to their honor and reputations, and then when they have a bunch of power and money and honors they... just spend their time sitting around, eating, arguing, being obnoxious. If they aren't fighting, they're out of ideas. Some of the richest people in the history of the world and their lives look unbearably crappy.

So I don't care about them and I don't like them and I'm glad when I get to the end.

Wait--I actually like Caesar's sister who marries Antony. Octavia. She's a good character. She didn't deserve the stuff that happened to her, and Antony's death was probably a good thing in her life.

I'd like to see a play about Octavia. Maybe she took up painting miniatures and had a happy life with her second husband, a kind man who managed an import-export business and taught their kids how to fly kites.

Anyway.

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Where Caesar Had It Coming

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Catching up on all the Shakespeare I never read, I was a little surprised to realize I never read or studied Julius Caesar in any college class or on my own to teach in high school. I kinda thought I had, but nope--this was definitely the first time through the whole thing, despite so many lines being familiar.

And just because I want to, I'm reviewing this as if it's a random play come to hand by an unknown author. Seen that way--I give this 4/5 stars.

A modern reader can dip into this play pretty well, IMO, understanding it well enough to follow the story without maybe keeping all the characters straight. And it's reasonably entertaining that way. Seeing men of renown trying to decide if it's better to commit murder than let a populist undermine their republican institutions and destroy generations of custom and tradition to become a tyrant is brilliant. You think, if you don't know the actual history, that maybe it will work out. The people will see that they are defenders of the Law even if they break the small "l" law to uphold it, since no one else was going to save them. Not the courts, amirite?

The murder comes surprisingly early in the narrative. We get the public reaction in the middle, and then we turn to the resulting war in the end. I miss seeing the part where Brutus and Cassius end up in Greece with their own armies--how'd they do that? Suddenly, without benefit of that explanation, we're somewhere near Philippi, and four armies are ready to face off. Cassius and Brutus are angry and then they're not, which I didn't understand and I haven't researched to have it explained, and they're facing Antony and Octavius, who aren't exactly seeing eye to eye either.

I'd like to see the fighting scenes on the stage, see how it works, because it doesn't sound very satisfying. A natural effect of producing such stories on a literal stage is that you can't get an actual army together (like you can in a movie) so most of the important stuff must happen offstage, with somebody narrating what they're seeing or what has just passed. It feels less immediate, but you can see why it must be that way.

Shakespeare has Cassius commit suicide when he mistakenly believes his friend has been captured, and then his friend follows him. I kinda hate that. Cassius really did commit suicide, though, however it happened, which makes it pretty anticlimactic when Brutus does the same thing. In real life, apparently, Cassius and Brutus each killed themselves after different battles near Philippi, and all Shakespeare did was bring them closer in time. Either way, it's not great drama to have the main characters just tap out at the end. Real life sucks.

I kinda wonder if Elizabethan audiences thought their own government was closer to the Roman Republic of old or the Roman Empire that came after. Did they see the parliament of that day as a sort of modern senate with republican pretensions? Or did they view their sovereign as a tyrant who ruled without much public pressure to counterbalance their power?

Which team were they rooting for? That's what I wonder.

Mostly fun to read. Not too long. Some memorable lines, even if you're not reading for that purpose. Antony's speech is very clever; it took a good writer to make that work the way it did. The ending disappoints a bit, kinda petering out, but overall it's still entertaining after all these years.

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Where Robinson Crusoe Figures It All Out

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked it a lot more than I expected to. This is a very entertaining book.

I see some people hate it, though. I get it--more on that later.

Considering this was published in 1719--and that Defoe was born in 1660--it's kind of amazing how entertaining and easy to read it is. That puts it much closer to Shakespeare than to Colleen Hoover or Tom Clancy. I've read novels a hundred years more recent that read older than this. (I've also read his Moll Flanders, back in college, and I kind of hated that, which is half the reason I didn't expect to like this. I approve of the theme of Moll Flanders, but the novel was very slow and hard to read, IMO.) Some people thought this was slow, but it worked for me.

I didn't like everything. There's a lot of baggage that comes with British dudes of that era, including overt racism, xenophobia, and casual misogyny, and the reader is forced to take a philosophic attitude toward the rhetoric emerging from those bigotries or give up reading it altogether. (To be fair, I have the same feeling while reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Old Testament of the Bible, or really pretty much anything written in a much earlier era when hating others was the norm. People used to accept a lot of horrible nonsense that did great harm to so many people. Still do, come to that.) Many things a modern audience abhors, like slavery in the New World, are treated as normal and just fine, actually, by the MC and, it would seem, by the author, which all makes sense from a historical perspective but is a bitter pill for the reader. Something that feels ironic to us in the present but wouldn't have seemed that way in the past was the fact that Crusoe becomes very religious, holding forth at length on Christian ideas, even while still accepting slavery and other injustices as perfectly natural, even becoming rich off of it. But that was mainstream thought on both accounts. Unfortunately.

However, Crusoe himself is made a slave for a portion of the novel, captured by Muslim pirates on the coast of Africa where he spends a few years, and though he wants to be free he never really complains about his lot or suggests his owners have done anything evil. He treats the condition as just bad luck, not a moral wrong that needs righted. So at least he's consistent.

An unavoidable flaw in the novel, IMO, is the nature of the story when told by a man all by himself. We get many chapters of pure narrative, unrelieved by dialogue. It still works okay, but it's less vibrant as a result. He needed Tom Hanks' volleyball to talk to or something. Friday and the other castaways don't show up until about 3/4 through.

All that aside, it's a packed story and feels pretty authentic, like something that might have happened. I wasn't interested in his religious awakening, which takes up pages here and there, but the way he managed to create a comfortable life for himself on an uninhabited island makes for good reading. Entertaining. Captivating, even.

I realized I had a very similar reaction to Treasure Island a few years ago--finding it surprisingly readable and entertaining when I thought it would be dry and too dated--and now I wonder if I need to read only old adventure novels that feature islands.....

The ending also underwhelms. Lots of loose ends get tied up, but I swear the final paragraph reads like the next-to-last page of a book. I was looking for a "happily ever after" sentence or something. These disappointments make what might have been a 5-star read pretty much a 4. But that's still good.

Recommended for adventure readers. My recommendation--get an old copy somewhere. Lean into the age of the story. I think you'll like it.

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Where Neither Knight Nor Lady Are Quite What They Seem

The Lawless Land by Boyd Morrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really liked this. No question about giving it all the stars.

I'd never heard of this until we went to an a bookstore event to see Stephanie Barron and get the last book in the Jane Austen Mystery series. (So good--all of them, including this final book. My thoughts for that are here: http://inspeculation.blogspot.com/202...) Another author was there that I once tried to like but failed, though most of the attendees seemed to be there to see her. And along with them were Boyd and Beth Morrison, talking about their medieval series, now on its second book. We bought both (and got them signed, of course). Good decision.

The action is excellent, almost non-stop, but is absolutely believable all along. It reads like a fun fantasy, but it's all realistic because the research and scholarship is top-notch. That's partly because Boyd Morrison is a professional writer, but maybe more because his sister and co-author is a curator at the Getty Museum and an expert on Middle Ages documents (and lots of connected stuff, obviously). It's a great collaboration. Not only does the action ring true, but the details of the place do, too, without intruding.

Gerard Fox is racing across England and France with a noblewoman who is escaping a marriage to a horrible man, both of them protecting a secret (a good secret--an interesting secret) that her would-be husband and an ambitious cardinal want to use for their own advancement. Fox is a capable knight and Lady Isabel is a very independent woman, but they're still human and limited and vulnerable to the dangers of the time. The stakes are real. The way they use their strengths, especially their ingenuity, to fight their way through and around perils is fantastic. Action. History. A bit of Romance. Loyal friends. Amazing settings.

It's great.

I'll shortly open the second book, but I'm also gonna look up books Boyd wrote on his own, apparently set in the present. I suspect they're also a great deal of fun.

Highly recommended.

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Where Edmund Takes on Canute

Edmund Ironside by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really liked it. The handful of other readers on goodreads didn't like it. Huh.

I'm probably right. ;)

Though officially anonymous, some people say this is an early play by Shakespeare. [which people? citation needed] [JK--it was E. B. Everitt, Eric Sams, and Peter Ackroyd. They point to language, mostly.] And I wouldn't be surprised if they were right. It's got nicely regular iambic pentameter; unrhymed except for the odd couplet at the end of a scene or the last time we see a character; the comic relief servant speaks in regular prose; many nicely dramatic scenes with a very Iago-like villain... Sure, all those things are Elizabethan, but to my terribly untrained eye it seems like it could be an early work.

Besides, it's very fun. Good action, both offstage and on. Memorable characters. This is when the crown of England was passing back from Danes to native-born Englishmen (then back, then back again) a generation or so before the Normans arrived. It makes good use of the best sources of history at the time, even to using the language of the sources (Holingshead and Grafton).

I've read a few dull plays recently and tried to like them; this one I liked without effort. Should be fun to see on stage. So--recommended. Whether it's Shakespeare or Mr. Anonymous.

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Where Imogen's Play Is Named after Her Dad

Cymbeline by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not angling for any hot takes or anything, but Cymbeline has become my new favorite Shakespeare play. I liked it. I enjoyed reading it. I would like to see it performed.

And I'm maybe the only one.

First of all, it's a very entertaining story, based mostly on one of the tales from the Decameron, where a dude bets a guy he could seduce his love and then cheats (lies and produces stolen evidence) to prove that he did it. Then the supposedly-injured man despises his love... and after that, hijinks ensue. Lots of "kill her!" and "No, second thought, don't kill her!" and "Oh no, I hope you didn't actually kill her!" Also: lots of people in disguise and lots of secrets coming out.

A subplot is about the courtier falsely accused of treason who is banished 20 years before the start of the play; he kidnaps the two princes and raises them in the wilderness, just in time to enter the story as noble young Aragorn types.

Then there's the evil queen stirring up shit between the Britons and the Romans, along with her evil son.

Altogether, it makes a pretty good Romance-style story, one that could have been 500 pages of beautiful prose from the pen of Sir Walter Scott. And best of all--for me, because this is what I like--it's a comedy with a happy ending. Imagine Othello, but where he learns the truth BEFORE he kills Desdemona, and instead of murdered wife and murderer husband they live happily ever after. (Don't @ me. I taught that play many years in school and I contemplated changing the ending every time. Don't kill that sweet woman! Stop! Horrible ending.)

(Jesus, Grandpa! What did you read me this thing for?)

I was curious to see if others took to the play like I did, and it doesn't look like it, but it's hard to say. In numerous articles purporting to list the "best" plays in order (which is not what I was looking for, but I peeked), Cymbeline ends up in the middle, or a bit closer to the end. In the one article I found listing "most popular" plays, which actually measured whether people knew it or not, it ends up second to last, just ahead of Pericles. (Which I also liked, btw.) Neither answered the question of what people like. Most people don't know it because it's seldom used in classrooms; scholars don't rank it very high because they don't like fun things. But that doesn't really tell us what regular people (which I think I am, thank you) *would* think of the play if they saw it or read it.

I think they'd like it.

Recommended

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Where the Pulp Heroine Kicks Ass

Provenance by Alex Archer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like any well-written pulp novel, this moves along quickly and keeps the reader engaged. For me, that means when I go to pick up the next book in the pile each day to read a chunk, I don't skip over this one. Lots of fun. Interesting new characters. It's a bit broken up into segments that don't connect terribly well, and could probably start closer to the middle, but in spite of jumping around, it stayed entertaining.

Technically, this is a pretty bloody book and series, with lots of guns and swords and explosions, but it doesn't feel bloody--not like some grimdark books or terrifying thrillers of the Criminal Minds type. I suppose that is because it feels less realistic than such novels, with lower stakes. Cozy pulp.... (I kid.) I wouldn't say cartoony, but it is definitely pulpy. I suppose if the main character acted normal, if it was more like real life, she would NOT charge into so many dangerous situations so recklessly. But she knows there are a few dozen more novels in the pipeline, all about her, so she's gonna be fine.

Recommended for people who like this series.

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Where Annja Creed Hunts for Thor's Hammer

God of Thunder by Alex Archer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the 7th in a long-running pulp series written by multiple authors (Mel Odom for this one) and I liked it quite a bit. Entertaining. Annja Creed and the whole Rogue Angel series is like an updated version of men's adventure fiction, like Doc Savage or Mack Bolan or Remo Williams, and though there's still a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, globetrotting, and gun-wielding bad guys the protagonist has to face, the violence feels a bit toned down and secondary. She's interested in history and artifacts, and that focus leads to cool connections with hidden or little-known bits of history that are a pleasure to read about.

The history in this one leads her from the US to Venice, then finally to Latvia, where there is a legend about an ancient viking who once joined a Baltic tribe and protected them with a device that can only be described as Thor's hammer. The usual bad guys get involved and try to beat her to it, and the usual regular folk get in the middle and need protected. Despite the genuine supernatural elements (including a sword that Annja can summon at will) the story and series seems realistic in most ways, like urban fantasy that leans more toward urban than fantasy. It's a mix that works well.

The action plot serves the purpose here, and the writing is quite good, IMO; better than Doc Savage, anyway. The pacing leans toward quick, moving along like an action movie (which it resembles in almost every way) and it makes it a perfectly fun read. (Some people would call these books a guilty pleasure, but my position is that there is no guilt in reading entertaining books. They are produced by Harlequin, the long-time romance publishers, and they know how to make a fortune off books that people enjoy but feel like they shouldn't!)

Anyway, for those who enjoy action books or other pulp fiction, this is a fun series, and this is a good title. Recommended for those readers.

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Where Shakespeare Collaborated with Some Dude

Henry VIII by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Since this probably is a collaboration between Shakespeare and another writer (John Fletcher, who I don't know) I feel justified in only giving 3 stars. I didn't find this a very entertaining read, unlike most of his other history plays, and it doesn't sound like it'd be much fun to see on stage. I could be wrong, but in the mind's eye it seems kinda meh.

For the most part, this play is just a series of unconnected scenes from the life of Henry VIII, without leading much toward anything except maybe the praising of Queen Elizabeth at the end, spoken as if in prophecy when she was a baby. The work overall feels more like a pageant, a parade, a spectacle, than a true play. There are many scenes of processions, like the entrance of Anne Boleyn, or trials and confrontations, like with Buckingham and Queen Catherine and then Wolsey, and there are lots of horns and rich costumes. Maybe that'd be fun to see, but it doesn't feel much like a story.

One thing you can see in this play is how terribly bad they were at getting at the truth or offering anything like justice in that era. Justice, whether it's destroying Buckingham or divorcing Catherine or trying to ruin Cranmer, is capricious and unreliable. The whims of power and the convincing lies of conspiracy decide the fate of characters (and real people, presumably) in this story.

The disjointed nature of the plot, without any sign of a unifying conflict, makes it especially hard to read with real comprehension. (Henry wanted an heir, and that's pretty important here, but it doesn't feel like it's the central conflict. One of many.) Just one damn thing after another. I'm not surprised to read that it's seldom staged.

I found the rewards of reading this particular play pretty modest. Others may find more to like. For me, it's on to the tragedies that I haven't read before. Fingers crossed.

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