Book Review: The Briar King by Gregory Keyes

three stars This was published 2003. It suffers in comparison with A Game of Thrones which came out a couple of years before. I wouldn't be a fantasy reader by any stretch of the imagination but it feels more old-fashioned. It is quite similar in some ways, same type of fake mediaeval fantasy setting with knights etc. Compared to Game of Thrones it is a bit thinner setting wise (not a bad thing in itself for a shorter read). Greg Keyes is a fencing instructor by profession and some of this comes out, one of the characters introduced later in the book is a sort of fake Italian Renaissance fencer type bravo and this seems a bit out of place in the mediaeval setting. Overall it kept the attention and is a good three star book well written, plotted reasonably well, but otherwise hard to get excited about, if you are not into fantasy it would be hard to see why anyone would recommend you to read it. Only reason I came across it was because AJ Abbiati used a sample of it in his breakdowns, and the scene he chose from early in the novel shows Greg Keyes is a skillful writer. But again hard to recommend it unless you were already into fantasy

Book Review - Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham

Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham three stars very good, three and a half to four star book. The techniques and tools that he discusses are very useful and the explanations are very helpful. One or two of people who had reviews were saying that his examples from his own work were ridiculous and to a certain extent this is true, there is stuff from a comedy western he did which seems very dire and wouldnt encourage you to go out and buy the book, and there is stuff from some other book about a girl falling down a mine shaft which his explanation makes seem like writing by numbers and is ridculous but his explanations even in these cases of why he wrote what he wrote and the reasons he had for handling the scenes in the way he did and what he was tryiing to achieve, which is the whole point of the exercise is very good and followin along and understanding how certain decisions were made, and maybe not even at one time or in one draft but to see how certain decisions were made and how certain ways things can be written was very useful. And also his whole theory, taken futher by AJ Abbiati or the whole natural order of the rhythm and syntax of scenes (which I presume comes form his own mentor Swain of The Techniques of the selling writer) and they are universal stuff, so that as there are three or five acts, there are also natural rhythm and syntax of scenes and even withing scenes, thinking, acting , acts and reactions – he is quite strong on this and as a way of supplying techniques where when writing you might have got lost with your experience of being a reader more than a writer where you have subconsciously absorbed techniques but wouldnt be able to consciously articulate what you were trying to achieve and not be sure what has gone wrong So wehre painters get a technical training where somebody not trained would not see the tecnhique whereass soimebody who has even a few art lessons will be able to understand how it was done, also musicians would have a technical traiining. Thatre there is a lot more than just learing the notes, and that there is a lot more to writing than just ging blah blah blah and the way that Jack bickham provides techniques and walk throughs of how to break down a scene is very useful indeed

Book Review: Iron Kingdom - the Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600 – 1947 by Christopher Clark

Iron Kingdom - the Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600 – 1947 Christopher Clark rough draft of review three stars I would give this three and a half stars if it was possible. I really enjoyed reading this book for the most part, there were a couple of niggles, of which more anon. The premise of the book seems to be to show that there was more to the kingdom of Prussia than jack-booted officers twirling their moustaches and mindless militarism. And Mr Clark succeeds in showing this, from the modest beginnings of a small collection of scattered territories centred around the state of Brandenburg at the end of the middle ages into a great power capable of forcing a united Germany in the late 1800s. It is interesting to read of how the country land-owners resisted the central government. And how the peasants had certain rights and were not shy about standing up for themselves. How women had a good deal of power and freedoms in early modern Germany (the idea of the woman's place is in the home being a recent invention in historical terms). How the Brandenburg army was so weak that the Swedish army could ravage the countryside and massacre the people in the Hundred Years War, and how they were of so little account that the Austrian army could come along shortly after and do the same, whether Brandenburg was on the Austrian side or neutral. How the succession of three brilliant kings Frederick William, Frederick William II and Frederick II (The Great) gathered together a kingdom with so many contradictions that it contained the seeds of its own destruction. I was very interested to see read about Frederick the Great in particular and how he made Prussia a place of religious tolerance and somehow made a country where Poles, Polish speaking Germans, Lithauanians and (sometimes) even Jews could make a home and not feel threatened. Sadly of course, this didn't last for ever, with first the Culture Wars against the Roman Catholics and waves of anti-semitism down through the years. I also was surprised to learn of the strange gentleness of the Prussian penal code compared to the British and even French ones of the same era – captial punishment was very rarely used. and even little snippers like that fact the Berlin was a minor backwater of a city set in marshland. The niggles – the book seems to end somewhat abruptly, the time of the First World War and beyond is galloped through and I felt that after the set-up he didn't fully deliver on his thesis that the success of Prussia was the key to its own downfall. A fuller explanation would needed to my mind. Occasionally he is a little bit too right-on, twenty-first century academic and determined on viewing the past through a 2000's liberal arts lens. The past is a different county. I get that. And when dealing with the history of an actually different country, the similarities may be more important to hold onto than pointing up the differences