In better book news..

[gridlore]

After the Future of War debacle (it didn't improve, and made all sorts of bizarre assumptions) I bounced back with a couple of good new books.

What If? 2. As an alternate history geek, I'm loving this series. Serious historians examine scenarios like "What if Antony and Cleopatra defeated Octavian?" "What if Pilate refused to crucify Jesus?" "What if Teddy Roosevelt had won the Republican nomination in 1912?" and so on. Great stuff, and gives me all sorts of ideas for Infinite Worlds scenarios.

Guns, Germs, & Steel. After hearing so many good things about this book, I finally gave in. So far, I'm very impressed by the both the scope and depth of this book.

Lots of good reading ahead!

Comments

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

What If? 2

The first one was quite good. Let me know how this one is.

-M

[todkaninchen.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to afford the newest by the author of Guns, Germs, & Steel, it's pretty much about cultures failing.

Still, one interesting thing about the book (Guns, Germs, & Steel.) is that it's essentially an anthropology book...

...written by a physiologist (and other training in there with it.).

The background he has ties a lot of human cultural behavior together with the environment using the humans' physical needs as the bases for cultural behavior.

One reason I'm 95% sure I want to be an Anthropologist of some sort...

...and am really happy my educational background is going to start biology/physiology heavy.

*grin*

[todkaninchen.livejournal.com]

Oh, and it just might give you some story/RPG ideas...

My copy's got several pages dog eared with concepts underlined.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I wanted it. It's giving me several ideas to explain the wildly divergent populations and tech levels in Traveller's canonical setting.