Alternate History Books - Page 2

Never Call Retreat: Lee and Grant: The Final Victory (Gingrich and Forstchen's Civil War Trilogy)

Newt Gingrich, William R. Forstchen, Albert S. Hanser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fails to Deliver 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

After reading the first 2 books, I really looked forward to the final book
in the series Never Call Retreat. I thought Newt Gingrich had done well
with Alternate history and its an area we all know it can be hard to pull
off and I thought he had done well with the characters especially with
Gettysburg. All of a sudden I felt in Never Call Retreat it seemed General
Grant comes in with one master plan to defeat Lee not just in one battle
but with one battle that settles the whole war. I felt that Newt Gingrich
had written himself into a corner with the first 2 books and this was the
only way he could write himsself out of it successfully. Everyone knows
how successfull how Lee was in real life and we are introduced to this
in the first book and it continues on into the second book. We don't get
this with General Grant Like a previous reviewer said with him you get
omni-potent powers where everything just falls into place for Grant. I was disappointed with this book. If anything I could have seen the third
book having a series of inconclusive battles between Grant and Lee that
happened in real life that could have set up a fourth book that ended up
at Appomatix. Not a book where it writes Grant has arrived the War is over now. Sorry General Lee but you're really a second rate general now
that I've arrived, but that is my take.

Editorial Review:

The New York Times bestselling authors of Gettysburg continue their inventive series with this remarkable answer to the great “what-if” of the American Civil War: 
 
After his great victories at Gettysburg and Union Mills, General Robert E. Lee’s attempt to bring the war to an end by attacking Washington, D.C., fails. However, in securing Washington, the remnants of the valiant Union Army of the Potomac are trapped and destroyed. For Lincoln, there is only one hope left, that General Ulysses S. Grant can save the Union cause.  
 
It is August 22, 1863. Pursuing the Union troops up to the banks of the Susquehanna, Lee is caught off balance when news arrives that Grant, in command of over seventy thousand men, has crossed that same river. The two armies finally collide in Central Maryland and a bloody weeklong battle ensues along the banks of Monocacy Creek. This must be the “final” battle for both sides.

The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 68 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fantastic Mystery! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I have to admit that until I did a mystery search, I hadn't even heard of Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins name came up, along with a description of The Moonstone as being "the best of modern English detective novels" (as quoted by T.S.Eliot). Big words, indeed. With those lofty expectations, I read The Moonstone, and have to say that this mystery definitely delivered. It lived up to those words.

One of the finer aspects of Collins work is his creation of mood and suspense in the story. There is a feeling of expectation and suspense from the beginning, when the moonstone is stolen, to the case of trying to find out who stole it, to the unmasking of events, people and circumstances at the end. There is a marvelous ability to create narrative point of view from the many narratives told from the various characters. And there are many--eleven different narratives--in total. From Gabriel Betteredge to Franklin Blake to Sergeant Cuff to Miss Clack and other minor characters, Collins is able to change narrative persona and "become" that person. There is a good deal of intrigue from so many voices, because, quite frankly, you do not know if you can take what the person is saying at face value. In this way, the human element of perspective is amazingly effective in telling this mystery.

There are other elements that make this a worthy mystery. Namely, you have a diverse number of characters, who have their various motives. Throw in a love affair, a tragic character, and an exotic jewel with a curse put on it, and you have quite a remarkable suspense. I have to say that I was hooked.

As far as my own personal interests, I found Sergeant Cuff to be my favorite character. Surely, he's no Sherlock Holmes, but there is a way he goes about trying to solve the mystery that I found refreshing. He's no average sleuth. One of my favorite scenes was the "experiment" performed by Ezra Jennings in relation to the events leading up to the disappearance of the moonstone.

There is also a little comic relief thrown in from time to time in the person of Gabriel Betteredge, who believes that life's answers and secret are all contained in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

The Moonstone is an engaging work, highly detailed, and maybe a little implausible, but Collin's overcomes this. I'm glad I found this one, and I've also heard good things about The Woman in White, another Collins mystery. Definitely worth a read!

Editorial Review:

Intrigue, investigations, thievery, drugs and murder all make an appearance in Collins's classic who-done-it, The Moonstone. Published in serial form in 1868, it was inspired in part by a spectacular murder case widely reported in the early 1860s.

Collins's story revolves around a diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder receives the diamond, but by the following morning the stone has been stolen again. As the story unravels through multiple eyewitness accounts, the elderly Sergeant Cuff - with a face "sharp as a hatchet" - looks for the culprit.

One of Collins's best-loved novels, with an exciting plot moved along by deftly-drawn characters and elegant pacing, The Moonstone was also turned into a play by Collins; the play appears as an appendix to this edition.

Lord of the World

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Last of All 5 out of 5 stars.
34 of 36 people found this review helpful.

R.H. Benson wrote two mystical visions of the future. _The Dawn of All_ is an extremely romantic and improbable 1911 parable of a 1971 world mostly Catholic and at peace, ready for the Second Coming. _The Lord of the World_ came first, in 1907, and was a darker vision. A world of flying craft, major scientific advances, and comfort has become a place of materialist despair. Euthanasia is routine, for the desperately ill and the terminally bored. Oliver and Mabel Brand, a rising young couple, are the golden ones -- Oliver becomes a major political figure, but Mabel chooses the cool despairing end of legal euthanasia. Father Percy Franklin is one of the last Catholic priests in a world hostile to freedom, church, university, and history. Eventually elected the last Pope, he is restricted to the dusty forgotten village of Nazareth. Julian Felsenburgh is a charismatic American adventurer who means to and does become Lord of the World, anti-Christ. Details are less important than the very modern mood. Believing in progress as the only good, people are swept into any movement that promises it. The past is ruthlessly exterminated. The quest for one world government that begins with Esperanto ends with one world dictatorship.

Editorial Review:

A CENTURY BEFORE LEFT BEHIND THERE WAS LORD OF THE WORLD Imagine a godless age, a time when all the world has fallen prey to soulless communism. This is the world that Christ comes to as he returns to us. This is the Second Coming. This is the End of Time. This is the Apocalypse.

The Camel Bookmobile: A Novel (P.S.)

Masha Hamilton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Power of Books 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I thoroughly identified with the main character, a 30-something librarian from New York, who naively believes she can make a difference in Africa through the power of books. The author has the courage to face the fact that books can be a two-edged sword, with the power to change for the good or the bad. Tribal elders have their own, more highly valued traditions, including oral storytelling, that are threatened by the introduction of books. At the same time, the younger generation longs for the chance to see beyond their village and to dream of a different future. The conflict between these desires and the difficult consequences that result create a spell-binding book. With hopeful naivety, my book club contacted the author's website, gathered two boxes of children's books, sent them to the real Kenyan bookmobile, and hoped for the best.

Editorial Review:

Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By helping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss to far-flung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.

But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile's presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of modernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.

His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire)

Naomi Novik

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 177 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Exciting Fantasy Set During the Napoleonic Wars 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

If you've admired the writing of Patrick O'Brian and are also a devout fan of fantasy, then you'll enjoy "Her Majesty's Dragon", the debut novel in a best-selling fantasy series written by fellow Brunonian Naomi Novik. Royal Navy Captain Will Laurence stumbles upon a mysterious dragon egg in the hold of a newly captured French frigate at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. It's a discovery that will forever change his life, forcing him to leave Navy service for the Aerial Corps. He forms a strong emotional bond with a young dragon immediately upon its hatching from that egg. Together Laurence and the young Temeraire will start a literary friendship that will remind readers of O'Brian's Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin in it emotional richness, if not in its intellectual depth. Novik has a fine eye for detail and keen ear for dialogue, telling her vivid tale in language that would have earned ample praise from the likes of O'Brian and from those familiar with both the Royal Navy and British culture during the Napoleonic Wars. `Tis truly a most elegant blend of historical fiction and fantasy, skillfully woven by a superb prose stylist and story-teller.

Editorial Review:

Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise to Britain’s defense by taking to the skies . . . not aboard aircraft but atop the mighty backs of fighting dragons.

When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes its precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Capt. Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future–and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France’s own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte’s boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire.


From the Paperback edition.

The Years of Rice and Salt

Kim Stanley Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 147 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

With the incomparable vision and breathtaking detail that brought his now-classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author KIM STANLEY ROBINSON boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know....

The Years of Rice and Salt

It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur–the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if? What if the plague killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been–a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt.

This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world’s greatest scientific minds–in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions and Christianity is merely a historical footnote.

Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson renders an immensely rich tapestry. Rewriting history and probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power, and even love on such an Earth. From the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Western Hemisphere, from the age of Akbar to the present and beyond, here is the stunning story of the creation of a new world.


From the Hardcover edition.

1632 (The Assiti Shards)

Eric Flint

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 184 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Anti-Catholic Propaganda, and an S. M. Stirling Knock-off 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

As a proud practicing Catholic this book offended me. Obviously the author thinks all Catholics are backwards, decadent, manipulative and cruel. Or hopefully he thinks anyone that's Catholic back in the 17th century was all that. I bought this book because of the similarities it bears with S. M. Stirling's _Island in the Sea of Time_. This is pathetic, some how Mr. Flint appears to believe that one small mining town of West Virginia can somehow conquer Europe, but wait! His town has a union! Of course they'll win now!

And the West Virginians have the Socialist King Gustavus Adolfus II to help defend them from the evil Catholic menace! AND they have more bullets than a cowboy's six-shooter-that-shoots-seven. No matter how many times they whup the poor, backwards, 17th century Europeans they never run out of ammunition, they even have a high-school cheerleader sniper to help them! Worst of all the author continues to push far-leftist propaganda by creating two Americans who are foils: a business owner and a retired Navy paper-pusher turned... SURPRISE! businessman.

I'm going to continue this series, but only because I saw David Weber's name on the sequel.

Editorial Review:

FREEDOM AND JUSTICE -- AMERICAN STYLE

1632 And in northern Germany things couldn't get much worse. Famine. Disease. Religous war laying waste the cities. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy.

2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia, and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time.

THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED....

When the dust settles, Mike leads a group of armed miners to find out what happened and finds the road into town is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell: a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter attacked by men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don't have to ask who to shoot. At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of the Thirty Years' War.

1633

Eric Flint, David Weber

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not nearly as good as 1632... 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I was substantially disappointed by this second installment of Flint's brilliant 1632. About two thirds of the way through this very viscous novel I began to ask myself when the payoff would happen. It never did. The material was dense, probably historically accurate, but BORING. Like it was written by a committee.

Most novels have some flat spots, but the author(s) usually reward your persistence and patience. Not so here IMHO.

And the afterward is a curious thing... Flint waxes enthusiastically about his committee approach to 1633 and further installments of his original 1632 novel. But its almost as if he's attempting to deflect criticism of this approach in advance.

To me, novels are mostly entertainment. 1633 reads like a history text. Instead of an afterward by the author, 1633 should have provided a bibliography.

Editorial Review:

Science fiction phenomenon and New York Times bestselling author David Weber (Honor Harrington series) and rising star Eric Flint present the stunning sequel to 1632--an explosive alternate history tale chronicling the epic struggle of American freedom and justice against the tyrannies of the seventeenth century.

MacArthur's War: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan

Douglas Niles, Michael Dobson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Just as Fox on the Rhine and Fox at the Front showed readers an alternate Europe in which Hitler had been killed, thereby radically changing the course of World War II, Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson bring us the Battle of Midway with a very different outcome.  The Allies are wildly out maneuvered and sent home in disgrace. Back in the States things are looking rather grim as the ultra-secret Manhattan Project runs into snafus that greatly delay the final production of the atomic bomb. President Roosevelt’s approval ratings drop dramatically. Congress is desperate and the country cries out for a hero. 
That hero might just be Douglas MacArthur, who vowed that he would return to his beloved Philippines. He plans to do so with the backing of the entire US Armed Forces.
MacArthur’s plan of action is simple: take the war back to the Japanese, island by bloody island, until standing on the shores of Japan, he can proclaim victory.
 And possibly gain the leadership of the United States as well.

Eifelheim

Michael Flynn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Could use some re-tooling, great premise 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

SPOILERS appear in this review, and deflate major plot threads.


My thoughts on this novel are that the NOW story thread never had sufficient relevance to the Then (main) thread to contribute meaningfully. It is curious that the NOW thread was a short story by this author previously. In this novel, NOW seems to be 10-15% of the novel. In a way, I would think NOW alone would present a better story, and I can see why the author was allowed/offered/asked to make a novel of it.

On the other hand, the author uses the NOW thread to create the final resolution of the story via the trip to Freiburg and subsequently Oberhochwald. It is hard to twine two story threads together when all from the first thread are long dead in thread 2. The interpersonal stuff, the friend helping Sharon on the physics side, and especially the librarian (who actually goes to freiburg with Tom) all seem like pieces of an unfinished relationship story, especially given the dysfunctional nature of Tom and Sharon's relationship.

The Then thread is essentially historical fiction with an anachronism thrown in - aliens, shipwrecked. A fair amount of the later story involves various philosophical and scientific (the two were indistinguishable) discussions which, being confined to trying to explain advanced concepts without language appropriate, became very tedious. I skipped quite a few pages when this started happening.

Later in the story, one alien mentions that his people previously had pagan gods, which to me meant that they should have grasped the concept of religion and particular who the Herr-in-the-sky was. I did think that the early NOW story implied there was a force or actual non-superstition-related reason why Eifelheim remained unpopulated, but the reader finds out that it was only due to the stories from the time of the first plague outbreak.

Editorial Review:

Over the centuries, one small town in Germany has disappeared and never been resettled. Tom, a historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. By all logic, the town should have survived. What's so special about Eifelheim?

 

Father Dietrich is the village priest of Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength but is still not nearby. Dietrich is an educated man, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact person between humanity and an alien race from a distant star, when their ship crashes in the nearby forest. It is a time of wonders, in the shadow of the plague. Flynn gives us the full richness and strangeness of medieval life, as well as some terrific aliens.

 

Tom and Sharon, and Father Deitrich have a strange destiny of tragedy and triumph in this brilliant SF novel.