The story of Cabeza de Vaca is one that I was dimly aware of from High School and College history classes but I never got the detail and perspective afforded by A Land So Strange. The basic story was de Vaca ends up being one of the few survivors of and expedition into Florida and…
After finishing a reread of Martha Wells’ Murder Bot Diaries series I was looking for something similar to read. You may not know this but the library has access to a program that helps you pick new books to read: Novelist. I availed myself of its services and it suggested among other things The Salvage…
In some ways The Brothers York is your standard history of the Wars of the Roses. It follows the myriad of factions vying for the English throne. All of the side switching and reverses of those factions. However, Penn does make an interesting argument. For all this civil war is presented as House of Lancaster…
David Green’s The Hudrend Years War is not a standard chronological history of the Hundred Years War. In fact if you need a history that follows the course of the war this probably isn’t the book for you. What this book does really well is cataloging the ways that a war that lasts for several…
The unique thing about Thompson’s Sea People isn’t that it’s a history of Polynesia but that it is a history of the search to figure out who Polynesians were. Ever since Ferdinand Magellan first crossed the Pacific Europeans have been trying to figure out where the people who lived on the islands of the Pacific…
The Voyagers. The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where…
Bright Ages is not your usual book about the Middle Ages and not just because it seeks to do away with the “dark ages” myth about the fall of Rome and the west. It’s lay out is episodic. It uses events throughout the middle ages to demonstrate how people in the middle ages saw themselves…
Writing histories of the British East India Company (EIC) is hard. First of all what is it? Its a multi-national corporation, its a business with governmental authority over a large portion of the Indian subcontinent , it has its own military, and navy. All of it headquartered in Leadenhall street in London. Secondly it has…
I, like many kids, was forced to read Canterbury Tales when I was in High School. Most of it flew right over my head and asking the teacher didn’t help much. For example what is a Franklin anyway? Liza Picard’s Chaucer’s People is the book I wish I had way back then. Picard takes the…
I will be the first to admit the title of This Is How You Lose The Time War was what originally drew to this book. Why yes I do want to learn how to lose a time war (although I probably could without much help). Turns out there is a fantastic book hiding under that…
Before William Adams (immortalized as John Blackthorn in James Clavel’s novel Shogun) became the first English samurai in the early 1600s there was Yasuke. Yasuke was an African slave/mercenary who ultimately become a samurai and served as a retainer of Ode Nobunaga a Japanese warlord from the Waring States period of Japanese history. Lockley’s African…
When I was in college I worked in a meat packing plant. There was a little old Vietnamese lady who worked on the same line as I did doing odd jobs. One day in February she handed me an ornate red envelope. Inside the envelope was a two dollar bill. I looked at her rather…
I quite literally found this book by accident. I had an appointment at a local Minute Clinic to see about a persistent cough I had (turns out it was bronchitis) but was a little early. I ducked into a bookstore to kill sometime and the first book I laid eyes on was Lucy Ribchester’s Hourglass…
I have a love/hate relationship with biographies and memoirs. On the one hand they are the natural adjunct to reading history. My problem is (and I fully acknowledge this an unfair and possibly self-defeating) I only really care about the parts of the subjects life that occurred during the events that made them worthy of…
I tend to think of myself as an ambidextrous history buff. They say that history buffs either like big sweeping histories of political events and wars or they like the from the ground up histories of down trodden and, typically, unseen figures in history. I like both and I think that is in large part…
Ever wanted to be king? Yeah don’t it kind of sucks. At least that’s the feeling I got from The Restless Kings On the other hand if you are curious what its like being a king in the 12th century this is the book for you. This book traces the events of Henry II from…
When I was in high school I was an absolute World War II aircraft nut. I could identify all the planes. I knew all their specifications. I knew the exact course of the air war in Europe and the Pacific. It got so obsessive that my teachers worried that I wasn’t reading anything else. Then…
Here is another book I read over my vacation. The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez is another series by Ann Swinfen. Unlike the Booksellers Tales this one is set in Elizabethan London. Sadly it isn’t available in the NOBLE system but we can probably get it through ILL so just ask. Christoval Alvarez has way…
You may remember my reading plans for my holiday vacation which I outlined in Jim’s Long Winters Nap Book List. As I suggested there it was an aspirational plan but one that I was somewhat successful in. Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants was one of those successes.This is a short book. Only about…
Charles Emmerson’s 1913 is a book I’ve been meaning to read since it came out in 2013. What drew me to it was actually my enjoyment of The Proud Tower by Barbara W Tuchman. You might remember Tuchman for Guns of August about the opening couple of months of World War I (Guns of August…
A small sample of the many new history book titles arriving at the library soon How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England: A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, and Braggarts by Ruth Goodman Every age and social strata has its bad eggs, rule-breakers, and nose-thumbers. As acclaimed popular historian and author of How…
So what do you think of when you think of the Crimean War (assuming you think anything)? Charge of the Light Light Brigade or Florence Nightingale? Those are some of the only iconic images left from the war. Orlando Figes’ Crimean War is, not surprisingly, a much deeper dive. I’ve read a couple of Figes…
I have to say I can’t actually remember how I stumbled on this book. I may have been trolling the internet for historical fiction and found it that way. At any rate I ended up with this rather esoteric work of historical fiction that I loved. Sadly we don’t have a copy of The Bookseller’s…
I’ve always been rather suspicious of stories that claim to be about something that was “forgotten.” Usually “forgotten” really means “not heard of by a lot of people because they didn’t really care until the book came along.” The Forgotten 500 falls into that category but its a story that was buried pretty far down.…
You may remember me mentioning Elsa Hart’s City of Ink a couple of months ago when I was reading the next installment of her Li Du Mystery series The White Mirror. City of Ink is the third book in the series and one that I approached with a little trepidation. What drew me to the…
Unless you are a close follower of Spanish history you may not be aware that prior to modern times there technically was no such thing as Spain. Originally the concept of Spain was just the region of Hispania, the Roman province on the Iberian peninsula. Even during the early modern period the people we think…
If you have read any Roman history or historical fiction it probably falls into two categories. Its set in the very late Republic and involves Pompey and Caesar and Octavian and Anthony duking it out over who’s going to control Rome. The other is set much later at the imperial period and involves the coming…
Like most Americans, I got my knowledge about the mob in Cuba from watching The Godfather Part 2. Havana Nocturne was actually a book I picked up out of my interest in the Cold War but I learned quite a bit more from it than that. As the name suggests this is the parallel stories…
The whole idea behind the concept of a Cold War is that there is opposition without war. Now we all know that when they say “without war” they mean we managed to not incinerate ourselves in a global nuclear conflagration. There was plenty of hot war in the Cold War. That is where the argument…
After the success of the Hamilton musical based on Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton, it is not surprising that Grant would be a hit. In fact it was such a hit, the History Book Group here at the library picked it for its September book. We will be discussing it September 19 at 7pm. This like…
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. opens with a woman setting in a house somewhere in Victorian London. She is taking up her quill to write out the history of the shadowy government organization called D.O.D.O. She is bound and determined that her narrative will destroy that organization. Flash forward to present day Boston where…
The first thing you learn from Inheritance of Rome is studying the dark ages is hard. The introduction is basically an explanation of why we can’t really know for sure what the dark ages were like. Not only are the sources limited but scholars are carrying around a lot of nationalist and modernist personal baggage that…
Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits is the story of a crime wave that gripped Paris and to a lesser extent the rest of France from 1911 to 1912. Although largely unknown today, it sent waves of panic throughout Paris. Headlines about the crime even drove the sinking of the Titanic of the front page of…
In tandem with my reading of White Mirror, I’ve also been listening to Imperial Twilight. I was vaguely aware that there was an Opium War and that it basically amounted to the British declaring war on China to force them to buy drugs from their colony in India. And that is basically what happened but…
Do you ever have those times where you really love a book and you think “oh I can’t wait until the next one comes out!” Then life moves on and suddenly you look back and not only have you missed the next one but you missed the next one after that. That’s what happened to…
You may remember from a post of mine a couple of weeks ago that I was reading Buckley’s latest, Judge Hunter. I enjoyed that book so much I basically turned around and pulled Relic Master right off the shelf and dug in. Relic Master has a lot of the same features I loved about Judge…
Books have a way of finding me. I don’t really ever have a moment when I don’t know what to read. I have moments when I can’t decided between the plethora of options I have to read. The Roads to Sata is a good example of books finding me. A few weeks ago I came…
So one Saturday I was emptying the book drop and Claire North’s The End of the Day was on the top of the pile of books. I looked at the dust jacket and thought it sounded intriguing. There was work to be done though so I checked it in and put it on the shelving…
Did you know that there is a debate going on as to whether Italy should exist? We take the nation state of Italy for grated but not so long ago it didn’t exist. Prior to the formation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1860 the very concept of “Italy” was in a constant state of…
I’ve always been fascinated by how commerce worked in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Like how do you move a hundred pounds of cloth from Yorkshire to Europe so you can sell it? How do you take out a loan when interest is considered a mortal sin? There is something simultaneously otherworldly and familiar about…
Yeah it’s been 40 years since A New Hope premiered in movie theaters! I can’t believe it, either. But I am digressing from my digression. I discovered this book while listening to a podcast called Pop Culture Happy Hour hosted by Linda Holmes. For those of you who aren’t already fans, this show, as the name…
This book opens with an attempted terrorist attack in the early 2000s. A mail bomb intended to blow up over Chicago. The attack was foiled but the package containing the bomb was addressed to a man dead for hundreds of years: Reynald de Chatillon a knight who lived most of his life fighting Muslims (and…
One of the lesser known benefits of working in a library is getting to empty the book drop. This means you get to see some of the books that are trending within your community. That is how home came across A Death in Brittany by Jean-Luc Bannalec. I checked it in and noticed the beautiful…
I have a small confession to make: I have never been able to get into China Mieville’s fiction. This is very embarrassing to me since his books look like they would be right up my alley. However, for some reason I have never been able to finish one. Then I saw October, a non-fiction account…
With the hundredth anniversary of World War I there has been a lot of discussion of “who’s fault was it?” Classically German gets the most of the blame but Russian and France and even England have gotten their share as well. Now Wawro has turned the eye of blame on the Austro-Hungarian empire in A…
So what is the meaning of a world map? That is the deceptively complicated question that Brotton presents in his A History of the World in Twelve Maps. They are not really useful for navigation. If a person needs to find the best way to get to New York City they don’t reach for their…
Feeling a need to read about a place warmer than here? I give you the Sahara. The world’s largest hot desert with an average high temperature of 104 degrees and rain fall that is virtually non-existent in some places. So what is Nicholas Jubber doing in the Sahara? Learning stuff from nomads. Specifically the Tuareg…
In our Today In History Reading List feature, we take the events of a particular day in history and try to give you a work of fiction and a work of non-fiction relating to those events. 1327 Edward III Crowned King of England Due to colossal misrule, Edward II was deposed by his wife Isabella…
You might be surprised to know that throughout much of the 19th century Europe and the United States were overrun by a series of pandemics that killed thousands. The disease was Cholera, which is cause by a bacteria that essentially causes its sufferer to discharge all the fluid in their body over the course of…
I know what you are all thinking, “Why hasn’t anyone written a history of the Compromise of 1850?” Well, your heart’s desire has been granted. Fergus Bordewich’s America’s Great Debate is just such a book. For those of you who are not US history teachers or 19th century political history junkies, the Compromise of 1850…
The Special Air Service (SAS) is the grandfather of all special forces units. Every time you read about the exploits of the SEALS or Green Berets you are looking at organizations built on the lessons of the SAS. Rogue Heroes is described as an authorized history, but not an official one of the creation of…
One of the big take-aways from reading Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes is how incredibly inept the CIA is. Weiner excoriates the CIA from top to bottom. Very few people escape his critical eye. One that does though was Antonio Mendez. You might know Mendez without actually knowing him. If you saw the movie Argo, Ben…
Richard Rhodes’ Hell and Good Company is the title for the October History Book Group (meeting Oct 19 at 7) and being more organized that I usually am I set down to read it well in advance. I have always found the Spanish Civil War fascinating. For one its a dress rehearsal for World War…
Swarup’s Six Suspects opens with a murder. Vicky Rai, a disreputable playboy, is having a party to celebrate getting off on a charge of murdering a bartender. In the middle of the party Rai is shot to death and as the title of the book suggests there are six suspects. Mohan Kumar, retired corrupt Chief…
I love reading all things espionage (as you may have noticed if you have read my other reviews). Fiction or non-fiction, it does not matter. My fascination with it rests in the fact that it is kind of the dark side of what I do for a living: searching for information. Therefore, it is not…
I grew up in the post-Vietnam War generation. I always had a feeling, as a child, that I wasn’t supposed to ask questions about the war. Prior to college my only knowledge of the war was a) we lost and b) it was bad. When I took classes on the war in college, I was…
I picked up this book largely because it was, as the subtitle suggests, something I had never heard of before. Seligman’s Tong Wars is a story of Chinese American organized crime in New York City from its birth in the later half of the 19th century into the 1920s. In 1882 the United States passed…
You know how one book leads to another? The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Greg Steinmetz is one of those. I was reading The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance and the name Jacob Fugger was mentioned. It was almost nothing; just a mention that one of the Medici might have…
I have a thing for the Medici. At least I have a thing for the first few Medici. Once you get to Lorenzo the Magnificent the family takes a sharp turn down hill. However Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, Cosimo de Medici (I have a picture of him next to my desk and to a…
If you ask most people what caused the American Revolution you would get some basic answer like “no taxation without representation,” stamps, or tea. We all have little niggling memories from school of being told, but can’t quite give a coherent answer. Richard Archer’s As If An Enemy’s Country is a step by step walk…
When most people think of Sicily they think of the Mafia; the more literary minded may get more specific and think Mario Puzo, but that’s as far as it probably goes. What makes Norwich’s Sicily such a great book is he delves into the fascinating and complex history of a place that is so much…
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the the Easter Rising, the event commonly seen as the kick off of the Irish Revolution. The revolution, lasting from 1916 to 1923, included the failed rising, the Anglo-Irish war and the Irish Civil War, and along the way resulted in the creation of the Irish Free State.…
What do you think when you think of American’s who remain loyal to England during the American Revolution – aka Tories or Loyalists? If you are like me some common images come to mind: white, wealthy, church of England, maybe arrogant.That is the image we get of Tories before and during the revolution from movies,…
Richardson’s The Damned, first book in the Darkest Hour Trilogy, (it sometimes appears as the Darkest Hand Trilogy) is a fascinating combination of alternate history, church murder mystery, and horror thriller all wrapped up in a nice dark fiction package. The book opens in the trenches east of Arras in the opening days of an…
A couple weeks ago a historian friend of mine recommended Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome saying “she tells a great story while also showing how hard it is to know anything about Roman history.” I have a pile of books by my bed that threatens to topple over and kill me in…
If you read enough history sooner or later someone asks you: “What would happen if a Roman army were to go up against [insert anachronistic warrior culture here]?” I’ve gotten Romans vs Vikings, Romans vs Samurais, and Romans vs Incas. I always hate these because it’s always comparing apples and oranges, but that is exactly…
Brodsky’s Immortals is the first book in her Olympus Bound series, a fantasy of Greek gods and goddesses in present day New York City. It’s a great concept. As people gradually stopped believing in the gods of Olympus they started to weaken. Finally, hundreds of years ago, Zeus decided to throw in the towel. The…
Trinity Six is a modern spy novel that hangs on the search for the fabled Sixth Man. In the 1930s, the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) recruited five spies at Trinity College, Cambridge. Now known as the Cambridge Five, these individuals– Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross– went on…
The History Book Group will be discussing Basilica by R. A. Scotti on March 16 at 7:00. Join us every third Wednesday of the month for great history discussions. Scotti’s Basilica is the story of a brilliant piece of architecture and the trials and tribulations of its creation. The second Saint Peters Basilica was the…
If you have seen any of the flyers, you know the library has a new History Book Group that meets every third Wednesday of the month at 7:00pm. Massie’s Catherine the Great is this month’s book (which we will be discussing this evening; all are welcome). It’s a long one, clocking in at 929 pages.…
Vincent “The Wolf” Marelli is the head of an international crime syndicate. He has it all, but in a flash loses the most important thing in his life. This is a tragedy for him, but it is also a tragedy for the people who did it since he is now coming for them. The death…
Those who have read Downing’s Jack of Spies (check out a review of that one here) will be happy to hear that the next book in the series One Man’s Flag is just as good. It is now 1915, and as Europe goes up in flames in the second year of World War I, Jack…
If you are like me you haven’t heard much about the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Which as I found out is kind of a shame because it really sets the stage for a lot of the wars of the 20th century. Pleshakov’s Tsar’s Last Armada, takes you through the final drama of that war: Czar Nicholas…
People have been writing books about the Battle of Guadalcanal basically from the moment the island was secured. As the first US land offensive of World War II, this battle has attained almost mythical statues. Hornfischer in Neptune’s Inferno tries to edit some of those myths while at the same time highlighting to often forgotten…
Ok, small confession: although I am a huge fan of all things Star Wars – books, movies, tv shows, comics etc etc etc – I don’t really like Jedi. Hold it! Before you throw rocks at me for this blasphemy, let me explain. Yes, people who can do double back-flips, batting away blaster bolts with…
One Soldier’s War is the memoir of Babchenko’s service as an infantryman in the Russian army during the First and Second Chechen Wars in the 1990s. Both these wars grew out of attempts by Chechnya to break away from the Russian Federation. Fresh out of college, Babchenko was drafted into the army and sent to…
I admit I picked up this book because of the cover. I first saw it in the new book display by the circ desk (if you haven’t checked that one out you really should there are a lot of gems there). And everything on the cover of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street has a connection to the story which makes it even cooler. Plus it has really great endpapers. This is Natasha Pulley’s first book and it is a mixture of historical fiction and fantasy.
One of the best parts of doing interlibrary loan (besides having the god like power of summoning books from all corners of the globe 😃 ) is all the books, music, movies and tv shows you encounter because other people have asked for them. Andrew MacLean’s ApocalyptiGirl: An Aria for the End of Times…
One of the things I’m always on the look out for is historical fiction set in an under represented time period and location. Elsa Hart’s Jade Dragon Mountain fits both of those categories. This is Hart’s first novel and it is set in 1708 in Yunnan province the border region between China and Tibet.
Ok I’ll admit that I picked up Ed Greenwood’s Iron Assassin because of the cover. A scull wearing a tattered top hat and high collar coat with clockworks behind one eye is hard to say no to. It turned out to be a really great story.
By Jim War at the Edge of the World is the first book in a series by Ian James Ross. Aurelius Castus is a newly arrived centurion to a Roman Legion stationed in 4th century AD northern Britain. Britain is a pretty quiet billet for Castus, who had come from service in the middle east…
Abulafia’s The Great Sea been on my bedside table for what seems like years. Actually it has been years. It is just exactly what it says it is a history of the Mediterranean from prehistory to 2010. The thing that has been stopping me is that minus end notes and index its still 648 pages long.
If Marilyn Johnson’s name looks familiar you may, like me, remember her from her first book This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. In fact Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble basically follows the same premiss
By Jim I first read Beryl Markham’s West with the Night when I was 15 or 16. I had an obsession with bush pilots and read anything I could find about them. West with the Night caught my attention because it was the autobiography of a bush pilot in Africa. Picking it up again after…
By Jim When I first saw Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe I though “huh I don’t really know anything about life around the medieval North Sea.” And that’s kind of Pye’s point. You ask “what is the historical significance of the…
The great thing about Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora (Book 1 of the Gentlemen Bastards series. Followed by Red Seas Under Red Skies and Republic of Thieves) is that it incorporates great character development, world building and lots of plot twists.
By Jim Now that we are through the first year of the hundred year anniversary of World War 1 I thought it would be interesting to read a history of that first year of the war. So I picked up Peter Hart’s Fire and Movement: The British Expeditionary Force and the Campaign of 1914. Hart’s…
The obvious hook of Georg Rauch’s memoir Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army is how did a Jew end up in the German army in World War II? Until I read this book I would have thought it was impossible but apparently it was a thing (see Bryan Mark Rigg’s Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers). In Rauch’s case he grew up in a intellectual Austrian family in Vienna. He himself was christian but his Grandmother was Jewish so by Nazi doctrine he and his family were, although not destined for a concentration camp, considered 2nd class citizens.
On the surface Perez-Reverte’s The Siege is a historical fiction mystery set in Cadiz, Spain during the siege of that city by a Napoleonic army. However the story has much more depth and complexity than a straight up murder mystery.
David Flusfeder’s novel John the Pupil has been repeatedly compared to Umberto Eco’s fiction. The similarity is definitely there. The story is about John a young Franciscan monk in 1267 Oxford studying under the English philosopher Roger Bacon (Bacon also gets a couple of mentions in Name of the Rose if I remember rightly). John is tasked with making a pilgrimage to the Viterbo Italy where the Pope is in residence.
I read a lot of history; I review a lot of history books; I read a lot of history book reviews; and I read a lot of book catalogs selling history books so not a lot slips by me. However this is a case of that happening, and I am simultaneously embarrassed (for missing it…
I don’t normally read books with “A Natural History” in the title; for all that I love the natural world and history, I have a hard time getting excited about the life and times of, say, a Western Blue Throated Snow Toad (which I totally made up just now). However, I’ve always liked Cormorants.
Recently there has been a resurgence in interest in the character of George Smiley with the reboot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Although Gary Oldman does a credible George Smiley for me he’ll always look like Alec Guinness from the BBC Mini-Series that follows the John le Carre novel very closely. I was thrilled to see Michael Jago’s The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham
How about a little Russian Revolution on Christmas Eve? Ok maybe not every ones first choice for the night before Christmas but at some point you should really check this one out (briefly tried to do a Russian Revolution themed lyrics to Night Before Christmas but it did not work). Books on the Revolution can be a little dense but if you want to read one that isn’t check out Figes’ Revolutionary Russia.
You might remember this title from my post Jim’s Bedside Table. Well it isn’t on the table any more. I read it over the holiday and really enjoyed it. Open Cockpit by Arthur Gould Lee (Sadly we don’t own a copy of the book. However I’m working to fix that) is the memoir of a World War I pilot.
I picked this book up simply because it was the only time I had seen a history of World War II told from the perspective of the Japanese. What I hadn’t realized is Hara’s Japanese Destroyer Captain was actually a much older book. It was originally published in the 1960s as Hara tried to help a younger generation of Japanese understand the war. The book I picked up was a 2011 reprint.
The main purpose of Alexander Lee’s The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in the Age of Beauty is to take those two views of the Renaissance, beautiful art and chaotic violence, and merge them together.
Have you ever thought “Why can’t there be more dragon’s in literature? Everything’s better with dragons”? Well Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon (first book in the Temeraire series) proves that to be true…
England has been in a nearly constant state of war with Spain for years, the Queen might be getting a little fuzzy between the ears and her spy service has a mole. Robert Cecil Jr, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, calls in Marbeck aka John Sand. Cecil does this reluctantly since he considers Marbeck a loose canon and, to use his expression, a coxcomb but he knows Marbeck is loyal at least.
Like many people, I first read about the Hundred Years War in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (which I got totally by accident because I mixed the title up with A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America which I was supposed to read for a college class), a hefty tome that takes you through all the four horsemen of the apocalypse as they ride across 14th century Europe.