Uhtred returns, older and wiser. In my review of the previous book in the series I said I wished the series would move forward, and with this volume it has.

Alfred the Great is near death when the book opens, the Danes are on the prowl, and only Uhtred senses that trouble is brewing.  There’s a sombre tone that’s new to the series, lots of Dark Ages geopolitics, and, naturally, plenty of  shield walls and one of Cornwell’s trademark climactic battles.

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“Just My Type” is a collection of essays about type. It’s about history, design, and technology. I found it interesting, but also found myself wishing the chapters related more to each other and that there was more context.

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Since I follow Apple news fairly closely, I didn’t expect to find much in this book. I was pleasantly surprised. Adam Lashinsky’s analysis of Apple is neither overly academic or overly popular. He doesn’t spend too much time on personalities or on oft-told anecdotes. In Lashinsky’s account Apple comes across as a radically conservative company that combines extreme attention to detail with extreme focus.

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Matthew Quinton, Restoration naval captain returns in “Mountain of Gold”. His inheritance is under threat and his sovereign send him on a risky treasure hunt for African gold. Despite that fact that I don’t usually care for naval fiction in which the characters spend much of their time off the high seas, I enjoyed this one and look future to the next book in the series.

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MetaMaus is a attractive book, beautifully designed and nicely printed. It contains a huge collection of draft drawings from “Maus” tied together by an extended in-depth interview with its creator, Art Spiegleman. While the history of “Maus” was interesting, the things I enjoyed the most were the insights into the creative process and the descriptions of how Spiegelmann solved the graphics and story telling problems he encountered.

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While Eric Weiner was in a hospital, a nurse asked him, “Have you found your God yet?”. The question motivated him to become a spiritual tourist. In “Man Seeks God” he recounts his sampling of several religions, including Buddhism, Catholicism, a UFO cult and Kabbalah. As in his book “Geography of Bliss“, he’s open, gently humorous and an amusing writer. I only wish that he had come to a more definite answer to the question.

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I was surprised to learn about the world-wide nature of System D. Even a poor African street vendor can be engaged in international trade. For example, Neuwirth writes about a Nigerian fish-smoker who sells to street vendors but whose fish come from Northern Europe. In economics, as in many areas, the world is stranger and more complex than we assume it to be.

“Stealth of Nations” would have made a great long Atlantic-style magazine article, but as a book it seems padded. Neuwrith fails to extend his examples broadly enough to support his claims of world-wide importance of System D. When he departs from concrete journalism and ventures into theorizing the book gets lot weaker and a lot less interesting.

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This graphic novel is from Forbes, not a name usually assiated with novels, graphic or ortherwise. It’s the story of the relationship between Steve Jobs and the Zen monk Kobun Otogawa It’s intriguing, but how much of it is true? It’s too thin to be a good novel, and it can’t be trusted as non-fiction since it’s “imagined”. I thought it was an interesting attempt but it was ultimately unsatisfying.

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Why read “Moby Dick”? Because it’s one of the two greatest American novels (“Huckleberry Finn” being the other one). But I’m biased. I’vre read it twice and have a print  of the eponymous cetacean over my desk. Nathaniel Philbrick’s answer is more reasoned than mine, and his book is worth reading for those of us who have enjoyed Melville’s epic and the other readers – the ones who should read it.

Philbrick tells us how Melville wrote the book and offers an appreciation of the books that’s enthusiastic and refreshingly non-academic. I conclude from his meditations that book needed to be huge to contain the vast and varied elements that Melville used in it’s construction. He calls it an “American bible” and makes a good case for it’s lasting value as “the mythic incarnation of America: a country blessed by God … that nonetheless embraces the barbarity it supposedly supplanted.”

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I didn’t expect the final volume in Morris’ monumental life of Theodore Roosevelt to be as interesting as the first two, but I was pleasantly surprised. Both “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” and “Theodore Rex” are great books and this one doesn’t disappoint.  It starts as TR leaves office, details his 1912 third-party bid for a third term as president, takes the reader on his arduous trip down Brazil’s River of Doubt (later renamed the Roosevelt River), covers his campaign for “preparedness” before World War I, his grief over his son’s death in that war, and his death in 1919.

“Colonel Roosevelt” is a wonderfully-written book about a fascinating, larger-than-life character.

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I thought this was going to be about Wendy McClure’s attempt to live life as if she lived in the Little House, sort of a female “Year of Living Biblically” . I was only partially right. It’s also a book about the love we can have for a fictional world, about experiencing literature as a child, and about the differences between fiction and memoir. It’s saved from being sappy by McClure’s 21st century edge and her ability to make fun of herself.

I really enjoyed this one and would recommend it to anyone, especially those with affection for the Little House books.

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This novel is a conventional “what if Hitler had died sooner” alternate history. It seems like 80% of this genre depend on Hitler living a longer or shorter life.

“Himmler’s War” is entertaining enough – much better than Turtledove’s stuff – but not nearly as good as Conroy’s previous novels.

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This historical novel is “Downton Abbey” on steroids. It covers the same period and deals with some of the same themes, though it focuses much more on politics and the passing of royalty.

The novel features Russian, American, German, and British characters. It’s a big, entertaining book, part of a planned series on the 20th Century, but it feels a little thin and it’s occasionally anachonistic.

(For similar but meatier fare, try the novels of R. F. Delderfield ).

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After “Victory” comes “Conquest”.   This is another book in the Kydd series.  Though it has a little too much on-shore activity – in Cape Town in this book –  for my taste, Stockwin develops his characters and they continue to be interesting.

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An archaeologist murdered on a dig in Israel, a lost Dead Sea Scroll with hidden information about Jesus, and an American pope with a secret: Meade hits all the bullet items for this type of book.  His execution is competent but the book doesn’t stand out in its genre.

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Even ignoreing fact that using that name of a classic book for the title of your novel is like a playwright calling his latest work “Hamlet”, this was a big disapointment.  I really enjoyed the previous books in the saga of the seagoing Cutler family, but this one lacks and interesting plot, is nearly devoid of action, and a few anachronisms (did 18th century Marines really use the word “perimeter”?) break the historical aura.  I hope Hammond regains his footing in the coming books in the series.

(According to the OED, somebody in the 18th century might have referred to the shape of a fortification, which is not how Hammod’s marines use it.)

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