Kavinay
You know how at your most cynical moments, you sometimes think any political decision is ultimately just about maintaining power anyway possible?
You're right.
Bueno de Mesquita and Smith tell you basically what no one who truly believes in any political process (authoritarian or democrat) can tolerate:
1. political goal number 1 is to stay power
2. staying in power is about keeping your coalition of powerful support as small as possible
3. broadening your coalition and other such reforms really don't make a lot of sense if you want to stay in power.
It's harsh but the book is written so well and engagingly that you forget you're taking in a work of hardcore political science. Copious research and case studies went into making what could have been an extremely wonky read feel indeed like a handbook. The chapter's presaging authoritarian tactics with a democratic framework (i.e. ratfucking) are especially chilling and prescient given that they were written well before the rise of the alt-right and global populist/fascist movements.
You could forego a massive investment of time and money by reading this survey of giants in western philosophy.
If you've already spent more hours than you care to admit in university lecture halls, then replace those underwhelming exposures with Warburton's concise and useful recaps instead.
For Rome to be great, Carthage had to be a legendary villain. Excellent and engaging look at the Punic Wars with Miles paying special attention to the propaganda war constantly being waged by all parties. The cult of Heracles as well as the issuing and debasement of coinage are unique touchstones throughout that drive home the long game both empires played for material power as well as historiographical sympathy.
Important to know: Lando lives.
Less surprising: no one likes you if Darth Vader is your father.
I really wanted to like this book more. The good part of the novel is that there are asides into the lives of common folk that are quite interesting. The bad part is that these asides are sometimes more interesting than the main cast of characters.
It's never a good sign when an author spends a lot of prose on exploring meta-narrative. It becomes a bit of a navel-gazing exercise. Still Guy Kay is otherwise quite adept at setting and telling a tale that is relatively small in scale compared to his previous highlights.
I don't even know is the story is that great. Lovecraftian elder gods etc. A
are okay, but what really stands out is Mignola's art. Artists with a strong inking background make a unique and powerful visual style that's unique to comic books. It's not just an homage to Jack Kirby either but also a perfect marriage of heavy blacks to occult subjects.
Serialization is underrated. Yoshikawa makes it work to his advantage with stories that interleave like both a play and epic.
Damn interesting for the engineering behind the scenes even if the military industrial context is repugnant.
Also, the shear lunacy of the CIA never disappoints.
The magic of le Carré is the ability to portray the intrigue of the cold war without wallowing in the jingoism that otherwise dominates the genre.
Best . Star Wars. Fiction. EVER.
I expected little but was completely blown away. This book makes you realize that Han is nothing compared to Lando.
A bit to much inside baseball in terms of exactly which part of each Clan touman did what, but that's the appeal of this sort of book if it's about factions you care about. Interesting narrative of the regression of Clan culture. I wish there were Reaving-era novels in the works. :(
Not as revealing as one would hope. Most of the behind the scenes stuff between 2011 to 2014 is well known to anyone who followed Canucks blogs, etc through the Era.
Still, it is a quick read and the Canucktivity info is interesting. If anything , it's a decent book that could have been much better with more direct sources from the team.
A disappointment that continues a long tradition of Star Wars villains being under-represented in their own books. The writing is fine, but unlike the recent Tarkin or the excellent Darth Plagueis, the titular characters just have nothing interesting to do or say for most of the story. So much time is spent developing their antagonists that we learn nothing about the Sith besides the fact that Vader is prone to mopey Anakin moments and Palpatine enjoys mind-games with his staff.
In fact, the most interesting part of the whole novel is learning that an Imperial Moff had a same-sex marriage. That's really it. You get a glimpse at how the organization of the Rebellion started in Rhyloth, but that would make “Twi'lek Insurgency” a more fitting title than Lords of the Sith.
Good grief. Everything that ends up on Calth and becomes uninteresting. Story starts fine and the Word Bearers are genuinely interesting. But once you get to Calth, urk.
It's a weird combination of archetypes. Starts as standard Imperial fare, becomes a warp horror show and then bolter porn for the rest.
Not horrible, but a bit of an empty story in terms of relevance to the meta plot. Sure, there's a bunch of ink spilled about Vulkan's corpse, but this is nothing that a short story couldn't have covered with less painful asides.
LOL, what a tease. It's almost as if every book threatens to at least bring Luthor and the Lion to a confrontation but then stops... and waits. Still, it's a far more interesting storyline than anything involving an Ultramarine!
I know the story, but it's still fun. Stackpole shows us how the Inner sphere and the Clans are basically a more exciting take on Game of Thrones than what GRRM would later publish in 1996!
Not what I expected. It covers a lot of ground but leaves a lot of Tukkayid unexplored. Interesting regardless as it sets the stage for everything that's going to happen up to 3067.
It still blows me away that Sakai can find ways to deepen and expand Usagi's tales. I mean how many “Ronin Rabbit gets in a scrape” stories can you write? Somehow, Sakai always makes it engaging.
Can get a bit clunky at spots (lots of nobels and elites prone to moping internal dialogues) , but still a fun read. It's where the clan invasion and culture starts to get fleshed out, and all the era's who's-who of the Inner Sphere youth experience the Wolf Dragoons version of Hogwarts.