REVIEW: Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors by Richard Holmes

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Note: This book review was originally written for an academic reading course on "total war". That conceptual focus is reflected in the review.

Total war as a concept requires, among its many facets, discussion of total mobilisation, which in turn requires insight into the men and women being mobilised for total war aims. Richard Holmes’s Soldiers contributes to that discussion by providing a social history of the British soldier, woven tightly around military history but centring the lives and structures of those who serve as contrasted to spotlighting the events they lived through. One aspect that Holmes highlights right from the beginning, is “not how much [the British soldier] has changed: but how little”. This is a meaningful statement to hinge the volume on. Conceptually, total war is best understood as a continuity, rather than a descriptor for a singular event or events. Holmes’s recognition that the centrepiece of fighting a total war – its manpower – must also be a continuity tracks well onto the framework and thus raises both the utility and the applicability of this book in the broader corpus of literature engaging with concepts of total war.

REVIEW: The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Forster

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The Shadows of Total War is the fourth volume in a series of five collating the proceedings of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C’s conferences on total war. This collection of 18 essays examines the concept through the interwar period, covering a spread of topics from military history as well as interdisciplinary perspectives. The strength of the volume is unequal, with the third and fourth parts, ‘Visions of the Next War’ and ‘Projections and Practice’, bearing out as much stronger and cohesive to the theme of total war. More so than in the first two parts of the volume, these later essays interrogate the social, philosophical, and policy implications of responding to the First World War as a total war and preparing – materially, ideologically, or both – for the next war as one of similar calibre. 

REVIEW: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

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I drank so much coffee while reading this book and writing this review - which, if anything, speaks to its supreme ability to make me yearn not just to return to the joys of cafes, but specifically to one run by an orc and her motely crew of companions. It is genuinely one of the most comforting, easygoing books I've read in a long time. This is a  Goldilocks book - I was not stressed over turning the pages, nor laboriously chugging along through chapters to finish it, but just in the right place: enjoying and savouring each minute spent in this world.

Legends & Lattes busies itself with eternal questions but doesn't seek to answer them through a sweeping quest or high-flung political drama. It asks how you make a break with your past and forge a future, and how you learn to find contentment and security within that future, and it does so by putting our protagonist, Viv, in the role of a coffee shop entrepreneur.

REVIEW: A Light in the Sky by Shina Reynolds

         

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It has been years since I have read YA fantasy. I seem to remember clocking out around the time Holly Black’s Wicked King was released, and staying away since. Who can succinctly say why we enter reading slumps? Perhaps the most universal explanation is a host of internal and external factors clogging one’s mind. And when one’s mind is clogged, a return to known avenues that provide easily digestible escapism is a pretty solid way to return to the field. 

I had hoped that Shina Reynolds’s debut, A Light in the Sky, would be that return for me. It tells the story of Aluma Banks, the seventeen year old daughter of a war hero and an aspiring Empyrean rider - a soldier defending the kingdom of Eirelannia from the back of a winged horse. The premise of this story - the cavalry-like prestige and camaraderie of mounted soldiers, both a physical and political arena, and a young adult on the older end of the scale coming into her own - seemed like it could add something new and subversive to the otherwise familiar pathways of a magical destiny promised by the blurb. However, “familiar” ended up being the defining trait of this novel. And while familiarity was what I was going in for, I was still hoping for some oomph, something that pulled my emotions from my chest even if it didn’t challenge the foundations of my being.

REVIEW: The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories by Nina Allan

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This review contains mild spoilers for the stories Amethyst, Heroes, A Thread of Truth, and Marielena in this collection. 

Short story collections serve many purposes. They are catalogues of an author’s smaller opuses, or a snapshot of one era in their careers. The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is a map, one in which the author as cartographer charts a journey that the reader is invited to follow. The stories, edited into one volume, are active participants in a larger tale exploring the author’s craft, and are “evaluating their relationship to a world that has changed since they were created”, as she says in her introduction. The introduction is, in and of itself, a highlight of the collection, replete with erudite and imagery-rich ruminations on the skill and imaginative power that drives and is driven by short fiction, in particular speculative fiction. Her commentary on the place of short stories in the careers of debut writers entering the market is set to strike a chord in every creative heart that has sought to have its words heard by others.