Such Tolerance Was Unknown

The film Captain From Castile is a beautiful first half of a historical epic. The first time I saw it, I hadn’t read the book and yet it was still more than clear that its ending was tacked on, and took place a good deal before the book’s ending would have. What’s more, the movie [...]

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Nerves.

“… Not that Pedro de Vargas knew what nerves were, but they still functioned.”

There is something immensely comforting, especially in these colder winter months, about picking up a gigantic, hardbound, historical adventure–about taking that first glance into an era and world and saying “I’m going to be here for awhile.” Knowing that one has a [...]

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The Tigers of Mompracem

So, in my many searches for the best in historical, swashbuckler-type adventure fiction, I have more than once stumbled across the name of Emilio Salgari–usually mentioned by native Italian-speakers who lament that they cannot share his greatness with their English-speaking friends. The premise behind his most popular character, Sandokan, stuck out to me especially: Sandokan [...]

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Agh, Finals

Too busy writing papers and reading actual history (as opposed to historical fiction) to really write anything here. 14th century travelogues describing Medieval sub-Saharan Africa are fascinating, but I’m writing enough about this stuff for class to want to blog about it too, and I don’t assume that most people share my interest in it [...]

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Whoa, Really?

Sorry for so much comics coverage recently, I try to deal pretty evenly with comic books and… uh, book books.
Anyway, I remember there being a Zorro comic sometime in the 90’s that I looked at for about two seconds before being real disappointed with it, what’s more, there have been some very bad uses of [...]

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