“Count Brass” by Michael Moorcock

 

 

339 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565049871

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Count Brass was the fifteenth (and last) in this series and the second volume featuring the character Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke of Köln, and includes the tales Count Brass, The Champion of Garathorm and The Quest for Tanelorn. Count Brass is the protector of Kamarg and the ruler of Castle Brass and, as such, is an ally of Dorian Hawkmoon and an enemy to the Dark Empire of Granbretan. According to Moorcock, “I must admit that Hawkmoon was never my favorite character but there are still a lot of people who like him best. I thought Count Brass was one of my weakest books, for instance, and yet it picked up rave reviews.” Just goes to show that the public likes what it likes, so just give ‘em what they want.

 

Count Brass picks up where the original Hawkmoon trilogy left off. It has been five years since the Battle of Londra where Dorian Hawkmoon and his allies defeated the evil Dark Empire of Granbretan and bought peace to a Europe far in the future. All that remains for Dorian now is to hold court in Kamarg and watch his children grow up as he grows older…or is it? Old friends long dead are beginning to reappear, and their intentions towards Hawkmoon are not friendly at all, while old enemies are steering Hawkmoon towards a confrontation where he must make an impossible choice. And there are consequences to these outcomes that even Dorian Hawkmoon cannot envisage. What happens next, essentially, is that Hawkmoon spends the book either explaining his theory or having his theory clarified and explained back to him, which got ridiculous after a while. The purpose of the first book of a trilogy is to set the scenes for all subsequent books, but Count Brass takes this approach a little too far and doesn’t leave much room for a story, not good for a tale of less than 200 pages. It has its moments with courageous heroes full of derring-do and evil villains with plans for world domination at any cost; all the makings of a great pulp tale, but only when it was allowed to have its head and run, which is rare.

 

Next is The Champion of Garathorm, which also serves as a sequel to the Erekosë novel Phoenix in Obsidian; perhaps because of this, the book is divided into two halves. The first finds Dorian Hawkmoon in a deep depression due to the shift of time and space he experienced in Count Brass that resulted in his wife, Yisselda, dying in the battle of Londra before they were married and, so, the children they had together no longer exist. The second involves his journey across Europe on a quest to alter the past not only to ensure Yisselda’s survival but also the defeat of the Dark Empire; this second half is more action-packed and involves that curious mix of medieval and futuristic weaponry that typifies any story involving Hawkmoon. Whereas Count Brass was a thin piece of work that was useful more as a set-up for these subsequent works, The Champion of Garathorm is a more full-bodied story that has a purpose and a more satisfying story arc, what with the many plot threads and characters from other books tying into this one, while it’s enjoyable to see threads from earlier books picked up and threads thrown out for works to follow (if you’re a fan of these books, you should be able to see what I mean). Overall a most satisfying second entry into this trilogy, an atypical thing to say.

 

Lastly, we come to The Quest for Tanelorn, in which Dorian Hawkmoon was successful in his quest, but his two children still remain to be found. If Hawkmoon is to finally reunite his family he must first find the mythical City of Tanelorn, the main McGuffin of this tale. But many perilous perils lie between Hawkmoon and his destination, the most dangerous of which will be reached by a ghost ship carrying more than one incarnation of the Eternal Champion and promising an apocalyptic fight at the voyage’s end. But this will prove to be the least of Hawkmoon’s worries when he finally reaches Tanelorn and finds the true identity of the shadowy figure that has dogged his every move. The Quest for Tanelorn attempts to do an awful lot in a few pages, this time wrapping up a trilogy AND tying up elements of his whole Eternal Champion series – which he actually manages to pull off. Mostly. If you haven’t read any of the other stories relating to the Eternal Champion then some of this may be foreign to you, but for me and other geeks, too, it was satisfying to see not only the conclusion of the Hawkmoon Saga but of other tales in the Moorcock Mythos, as well. How he managed to keep all of the facts straight I don’t know, although I suspect a good editor or two or twenty helped.

 

And with that…we come to the end of the Moorcock Cycle of Really Big Books and Thoughts. Altogether I thought it was rollicking good fun and I am delighted that I managed to get each of these books – all used, all hardcover and all in great condition – and enjoy a truly independent author and thinker and the many unique characters and worlds he crafted. Bravo, Mr. Moorcock, and thank you.

“The British Fighter since 1912 (Putnam Aeronautical Books)” by Francis K. Mason

 

448 pages, Naval Institute Press, ISBN-13: 978-1557500823

Who wouldn’t want a book for a buck? That’s what I paid for The British Fighter since 1912 by Francis K. Mason, part of their Putnam Aeronautical Books series, from the Clinton-Macomb Public Library book sale. And why not? Can’t do wrong for a buck, can I? This encyclopedic 80-year history of the British fighter aircraft, spanning development from the Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.2 to the British Aerospace EFA (forerunner of the Tornado), is by far the most comprehensive, book on the subject I have ever come across. The design, development and history of 272 aircraft in all are covered between its covers, including many prototypes for which no production contract was awarded.

Most of the fighters portrayed are shown with 3-view drawings and all with detailed specifications, seemingly reproduced from the official factory drawings. 123 of the subjects are WWI era planes, including the Pemberton-Billing P.B.9, the Robey Peters Tractor Scout and the Austin-Ball A.F.B.1. Mason does an equally good job on the interwar period and early monoplane developments, and even into the cold war jet age. In all cases the author is informative, readable and the text is crammed with detail I have never seen before, e.g. the Martin Baker M.B.5’s roll-rate of 94deg/sec. Props to Mason for all the intellectual legwork in putting this book together – and props to me for a helluva buy.

“The West Point Atlas of American Wars. Volume 1: 1689-1900, Volume 2: 1900-1953 by the United States Military Academy, Brig. Gen. Vincent J. Esposito (Editor), Dwight D. Eisenhower (Introduction)

 

West Point Dept. Of Military Art and U.S. Military Academy, ISBN-13: 978-0275200800 

I inherited these books from my Dad, and they are absolutely brilliant. When I was I kid I loved to pore over a good atlas, and The West Point Atlas of American Wars. Volume 1: 1689-1900, Volume 2: 1900-1953 certainly count. Printed on thick Buckram paper, with clear lines and colored markings for the different armies involved in the action, along with sparse but easy to follow descriptions of the battles and campaigns, it’s no wonder these atlases have withstood the test of time in the 50+ years since they were first published. I have no idea where Dad got these books from – and I wonder at the fool who allowed them to slip away from him – but he purchased them almost solely for the maps of the Civil War battlefields that he soon-after began to visit, dragging Mom and their brood along with him.

“Military works are almost universally lacking in adequate maps” Brig. Gen. Vincent J. Esposito wrote in his Introduction to these books, and he was certainly right. Whenever I am reading a work on military history, especially on the American Civil War, and I find the maps (if there are any) to be inadequate, I no longer launch into a hate-filled tirade at the author and/or publisher for their obvious intellectual and creative deficiencies; rather, I walk over to my The West Point Atlas of American Wars and seek out the battle being discussed in order to better follow just what in hell is going on. And they have never failed me. Made to last the ages, I am certain that I will continue to use these atlases on my never-ending quest at self-education and improvement, and I pity the poor bastards who do not have such a brilliant resource.

“Berlin: The Politics of Order, 1737 – 1989” by Alan Balfour

 

269 pages, Rizzoli, ISBN-13: 978-0847812714

The history of the architecture of Berlin can perhaps be boiled down to the desire to impose order from above, rather than to let a city grow organically, a conflict that would affect the city to the present day. In Berlin: The Politics of Order, 1737 – 1989, Alan Balfour shows that the buildings and monuments of Berlin reflect this conflict, of a city that was born of autocracy – order – feuding with a populous that wanted a city that reflected their needs – democracy.

Thus, we have King Friedrich Wilhelm I imposing a top-down rationality on his medieval capitol when he had three gates built in 1737: the Brandenburg, Potsdam and Hallesches Gates, which forced all future builders to follow the plan of the first. All of the big names are here: Friedrich Gilly, K.F. Schinkel, Erich Mendelsohn, Albert Speer, Mies van der Rohe, James Stirling, Peter Eisenman and their impact on the landscape of Berlin.

Covered as well are the political, socioeconomic and architectural backgrounds of the era in which they lived and worked and how it all affected the physical space they builders were working with. If one is not well-versed in the visual language of architecture then I’m afraid that the images within will seem ever-so esoteric, at best (at least, they did to me). But stick to it, for the message within is as interesting as it is enlightening.

“Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas” by Alan Trachtenberg

 

400 pages, Hill and Wang, ISBN-13: 978-0809042975

Author Alan Trachtenberg was an American historian and the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English and professor emeritus of American Studies at Yale University and was, by all accounts that I have seen, a respected scholar in American cultural studies for more than forty years before his death in 2020. In his book, Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas, he examines a famous American symbol or icon from over the 250 years and how it impacted the people of the time and up to the present day. In the 19^th Century, many believed that the new method of photography was a way in which a person’s personality could be captured in more honest detail than a painting; in his essay on Lincoln, Trachtenberg undertook to explore this concept and the sociological implications this entails for later societies. A related essay examines the extent to which Walker Evans’ Depression-era photographs created, rather than revealed, images of the South that to this day shape national discourse about the region, for good and ill (mostly ill).

I must admit I was surprised by this book, picked up for cheap from a little out-of-the-way place called Avalon Books in Shelby Township, Michigan (now, sadly, defunct). I wasn’t at all familiar with Trachtenberg and I certainly wasn’t prepared for some of the concepts he threw at me, and while these essays are always enlightening and thought-provoking, they are also often maddening and rage-inducing, like, for instance, this one: “Newspapers respond…to the increasing mystification, the deepening estrangement of urban space from interpenetration, from exchange of subjectivities”. Hmmmmm…yeahhhhh…this is esoteric verbiage of the first order, and I found myself reading this book with a dictionary at hand on my right and a thesaurus at hand on my left. There are moments of pleasure, to be sure, like his analysis of the political meanings of daguerreotypes in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a discussion of deadpan in the work of Mark Twain. Not for the faint of heart or the short of attention.

“The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III” by Andrew Roberts

 

784 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-1984879264

I have read two other biographies by Andrew Roberts: Napoleon: A Life, reviewed on April 13^th, 2015 and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, reviewed on February 8^th, 2019, and both were absolutely brilliant. So when I saw his work The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III on Barnes & Noble’s remnants shelves – brand new for EIGHT BUCKS! – well you just know I had to have it, knowing full well that I would get as complete and exhaustive – though not exhausting – biography of the Tyrant Who Lost America as one could get. And, naturally, I was right. Roberts is one of those authors whose books I would buy just on his name alone with the subject matter coming a close second; besides, being more familiar with the American Revolution from my side of the ocean, I thought it would be no bad thing to get the other, British side of the story of the same.

First things first: Roberts tries mightily to disprove that George was a tyrant while simultaneously admitting (under duress, perhaps) that his policies were a “colossal disaster” that left Britain with “vast debts, powerful enemies, no allies and even neutral powers united in hostility”. But tyrannical? Perish the thought. One way in which he attempts to defend the king is to show that the Colonists objected to policies and customs that subjects of other monarchs would not have found at all oppressive – which is moot at best, for the Colonists, as proper Englishmen all, correctly pointed out that said policies violated their rights as members in good standing of the empire. The rights or not of subjects of other nations have nothing to do with it. Furthermore, said policies were an intended hardening of the relatively lax taxation scheme and, thus, resistance to the same should have been foreseen.

Under Robert’s pen, George III is a really nice guy who was smart and accomplished, but who was also extremely political and capable of holding petty grudges. Under the unwritten British constitution, George’s greatest powers were to choose the men who ran the government and to distribute royal patronage in the form of titles and lucrative sinecures, and he wielded this power without compromise or remorse, though his selection of ministers was decidedly spotty. While he could be progressive when it came to the arts, music and architecture, he was much less so when it came to changes in British society. He was traditional to the core and a stickler for protocol, especially among the aristocracy; his and their inability to see the changes occurring in British society with the Industrial Revolution and understand the complaints of the Colonists in the New World are much to blame for their eventual Revolution.

Roberts gives us an enlightening insight into the role that American propaganda played in rallying the Colonists to war – including, in his opinion, the Declaration of Independence, a document that is rather more than mere “propaganda”, thank you very much. As a Yank I found his point-by-point refutation of Jefferson’s and the Colonist’s complaints about Britain and the King a touch over-the-top, and it’s not the only place where the author comes off as defending his subject a bit too vociferously, if you ask me. However, it does drive home his point about how out-of-touch British leaders were when it came to the progressive growth in the Americas and how if, just possibly, other leaders (and another King?) had been at the helm of the British ship of State at the time of the Revolution then things may just have taken a different turn – ah, what historian, professional and amateur alike, doesn’t like to play “What If”?

“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it” said Benjamin Franklin, while Thomas Paine called him “a wicked tyrannical brute” and Thomas Jefferson (in the Declaration of Independence) said his character was “marked by every act which may define a tyrant”. Roberts tries hard to redeem his subject in the eyes of history and succeeds a little – but not entirely. Reading The Last King of America put me in mind of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 2) when Gertrude, in response to how she likes the play, says “[t]he lady does protest too much, methinks”. As does Roberts, methinks.

“Earl Aubec and other stories” by Michael Moorcock

 

 

590 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565049864

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Earl Aubec and other stories was the fourteenth in this series featuring the character Earl Aubec of Malador, and includes a collection of 33 short stories (only the first of which features Earl Aubec and was already in a previous Elric book). And just what are these stories? *sigh*…okay, here goes: Earl Aubec, Jesting with Chaos, The Greater Conqueror, Going Home, Hanging the Fool, Consuming Passion, Wolf, Environment Problem, The Opium General, A Dead Singer, The Lovebeast, The Ruins, The Golden Barge: A Fable, The Deep Fix, The Real Life Mr. Newman, Goodbye, Miranda, Islands, Some Reminiscences of the Third World War [Casablanca, Going to Canada, Leaving Pasadena, Crossing Into Cambodia], Mars, The Frozen Cardinal, Peace on Earth (with Barrington Bayley), The Mountain, The Time Dweller, Escape from Evening, Waiting for the End of Time…, The Stone Thing: A Tale of Strange Parts, The Last Call, My Life, The Museum of the Future and To Rescue Tanelorn…And I’m going to review each tale individually, too…wait, the hell I am…

 

To give an example of just how long Moorcock has been writing, some of the tales to be found in this particular collection were written by him when he was a precocious 15-year-old; as he admits in the Introduction, “Some are a little embarrassing, a bit loud, a bit coarse…”. To be fair, the same could be said some of his later stories, written when he was an adult, so maybe that’s just his thing. Naturally, the vast majority of these stories deal with aspects of the Eternal Champion; however, if you crack the spine on this thing expecting to see the likes of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum or even Erekosë, you will be disappointed. These tales work more as attachments to those other, longer and better-known tales. The biggest problem I found with the stories contained herein is that, because they all appear to be a series of one-offs, little (if any) time is spent on character development or background and, thus, it is difficult to really give a damn about any of them, other than the fact that, as the protagonists, you feel obliged to do so; as one story ends and the character is done with, off you go onto the next tale and new character. Was this frustrating? Not really; these are, after all, self-contained short stories in which characters are introduced, a problem is encountered and then resolved by the end.

 

Some are forgettable, some are rather good and some other could even be described as great. Earl Aubec and other stories does what is supposed to do: gather together the tales of the Eternal Champion for the gratification of the reader. Mission accomplished.

“Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art” by Carl Hoffman

 

336 pages, William Morrow, ISBN-13: 978-0062116154

So, one day many years ago I visited my parents and, virtually from the second I walked in the door, my Dad shoved this book, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman into my hands and said, “Here. Read the first chapter”. So I did, and…DAMN.

So, a little background: Michael Clark Rockefeller was the fifth child of New York Governor and former U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the grandson of American financier John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the great-grandson of Standard Oil cofounder John D. Rockefeller; he disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern Netherlands New Guinea (which is now a part of the Indonesian province of Papua) under mysterious circumstances.

In Savage Harvest, Carl Hoffman claims to have finally solved this old missing persons case while also illuminating a people transformed by years of colonial rule and a culture that continues to be shaped by ancient customs – like, for instance, F*CKING CANNIBALISM. Combining history, art, colonialism, adventure and ethnography, Savage Harvest is a mélange work and a fascinating portrait of the clash of cultures that resulted in the death of one of America’s richest and most powerful scions.

In order to solve this decades-long mystery, Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea to retrace Rockefeller’s steps while immersing himself in a world of headhunters and cannibals (still doing their thing in 2013, so it would appear), a world of secrets, spirits, hidden customs and forbidden rites – like, for instance, killing a man, decapitating his corpse, cooking his head and eating his brains in order to gain something of his spirit. I repeat...DAMN.

While getting to know many members of the Asmat people – interviewing the elders of the tribe and discovering just what happened to his subject fifty-years before – Hoffman also sorted through many never-before-seen original documents. This after the exhaustive searches of the time uncovered no trace of Rockefeller – and the rumors that he’d been killed and ceremonially eaten, a gruesome tale that the Dutch denied and the Rockefeller family disbelieved but that, according to Hoffman’s research, would appear to be all too true.

This is an enlightening and disturbing book to read – and for any of my bleeding-heart liberal friends who insist on moral relativism and the basic equality of all cultures, I challenge you to read the first chapter of Savage Harvest and not thank God that you weren’t Michael Rockefeller.

“The Diaries of the Family Dracul” by Jeanne Kalogridis

“Covenant with the Vampire”

324 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385313131

“Children of the Vampire”

301 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385314121

“Lord of the Vampires”

347 pages, Delacorte Press, ISBN-13: 978-0385314145

The Diaries of the Family Dracul by Jeanne Kalogridis is a prequal trilogy to Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which much of that original tale is reimagined. The books – Covenant with the Vampire, Children of the Vampire and Lord of the Vampires – were all published in the late 90’s and, as far as I can tell, didn’t make much of an impact, culturally speaking. This is rather surprising as, all things considered, they are well-written and engaging, with characters that are not two-dimensional and a plot that holds together well, even if Kalogridis rewrites whole parts of the original Dracula in the third book (the ending of which…how do I say it…SUCKED).

Covenant with the Vampire truly feels like what Stoker may have written himself is he had taken up Dracula’s tale in the decades before his original story. Like in the original, Dracula is a lord living in Transylvania and the story is told, again like the original, through the diaries of various family members, particularly his great-nephew who arrives from England with his pregnant wife (also a great diary-writer) and his sickly niece, who has been stuck with him here in Transylvania (none of them know he is a vampire, of course). There is much historical detail and flavor here to go along with the creepier aspects of the original story: we have wolves, mysterious specters of the hero’s dead little brother, superstitious peasants, crucifixes, murdered babies and a vampire who is about as evil as you can get rather than dashing, erotic or pitiable. Covenant with the Vampire pays its dues and gives complete respect to the characters created by Bram Stroker (I find that many novels dealing with vampires are simply watered-down imitations of the character Stroker created more than a century ago). Dracula is the ultimate nemesis, but recently he and his kind have become glittery, loving, self-sacrificing…seriously, he’s a bloodsucking fiend who needs to be destroyed. Nothing good can come from “loving” something that sees you as food or that has lost its basic humanity, as modern writers have forgotten.

Children of the Vampire continues the story and Kalogridis’ style is still absorbing, with believable characters that come to life and an engaging storyline. Although warned in this book’s Prologue of Kalogridis’ decision to align her book more-closely with that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I still found the result to be interesting as the author reinterprets many of the happenings from the original work. Perhaps she did so because the legend is by now an established one and that may have played somewhat of a role in Kalogridis’ writing and prevented her from taking too many artistic liberties with the same. Oh, she is still present, make no mistake, for there is some of the most raw and unadulterated witty writing that I had read in a long time. There is also great detail in Vlad the sadist’s favorite pastime of torture in quite gruesome and vivid detail, so be warned. Children of the Vampire is a weaker book than the first in the series as parts of it drag on and on, especially in the middle. Overall it felt like what it was: the middle book of a trilogy, with the author moving the characters and plot lines to where they need to be for the last book. There are some metaphysical elements which start out interesting, but I got a little tired of pages and pages of them. But Kalogridis isn’t afraid to broach any subject or write any plot twist, and I was never exactly sure what was going to happen, so the unpredictability was nice.

Lord of the Vampires is the last book in the trilogy and by far the weakest. It certainly was ambitious for any author to write a series of prequels to Dracula that eventually overlap with the main book. All of Kalogridis’ extensive research is on display in the series, and the first two are excellent (though definitively noncanonical) attempts to flesh out the story behind Stoker’s magnum opus. Several passages have been lifted and rewritten from Dracula which, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing as Kalogridis attempts to fit her reworking of Stoker’s story into the original, often with interesting results as we see familiar scenes from different perspectives (one of the brides’ anger at Harker calling her “illspelt” was classic). Oh, and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory shows up, as she is wont to do in any other author’s take on the Dracula myth. For the most part, as an ending to the trilogy Lord of the Vampires is a good book, wrapping up all of the storylines and providing closure for all characters. The writing is a good mix of horror, suspense, thrill, mystery, gore and some even darker subjects is a winning combination. However…the conclusion in which one of the characters becomes a different type of vampire spoilt so much of the story for me. I won’t give it away, but it seemed like Kalogridis wanted a happy ending for her undead brood and it sounded a very false note.

The Diaries of the Family Dracul was, then, an excellent trilogy and a clever reworking of one of literature’s most enduring characters. While the ending leaves much to be desired, I won’t let that take away from the overall quality of the series.

“Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire” by Jason Goodwin

 

368 pages, Henry Holt and Co., ISBN-13: 978-0805040814

In his book Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, Jason Goodwin elegantly combines a deft historical summary of the Sublime Porte with the buoyant prose and idiosyncratic focus of a travel writer. While ostensibly in chronological order, the book is in fact organized thematically, as Goodwin leaps from one topic to another to try and delve into the psyche of this long-lasting though long-perished empire. Because of this eclectic organization, Goodwin is able to take the full measure of a realm riddled with paradox: a Turkish empire whose shock troops were Balkan Slavs and a bellicose state built through war that often governed its conquests with a light hand, a necessary approach given the plethora of faiths, cultures and nationalities that fell under Ottoman rule. For its time, it was a rather benign and even tolerant lordship, especially compared to many of the other states then in existence.

Before the Ottoman Empire became the Sick Man of Europe, it was, at its height, a society that was both civilized and tolerant, again relative to other nations around it and, it must always be stressed, so long as Turks and Islam remained on top. One shining example of this trait is when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 they were warmly received by the Sultan in Constantinople, Belgrade, Salonika and Sofia (as second-class subjects, to be sure, but tolerated in a way unknown to them in their native Spain). In Goodwin’s telling, this is due to the essence of an empire that built itself on militarism and a proud nomadic past, demonstrating convincingly that these shaped Ottoman interpretations of Islam and, so, affected how it could impact their rule on Turks and other Muslims to people of different races and faiths, from Osman’s modest beylik through six centuries of an empire that spanned three continents and 7.6 million square miles.

While Lords of the Horizons is steeped in orientalist apologia, it is not meant to forgive the Ottomans, but rather to capture the way they were perceived by their European counterparts and the atmosphere of much of its early historiography. It cannot be denied that, while war and superstition ruled Christian Europe, the Islamic Ottoman Empire thrived and glittered with mathematical, architectural and artistic accomplishment (at least for a time). Goodwin is great at describing how, for three hundred years before its final collapse after WWI, the empire survived even though it was perpetually on the verge of collapse, attributing the calcified empire’s sad decline not only to corruption and the rise of the West, but to the Turk’s prideful ignorance of the West, a vanity that eventually deprived the empire of the fruits of modernity. While its collapse may not have been avoidable, it could, perhaps, have been less painful.

Some people in other reviews I have read were critical of Goodwin’s ambitious narrative, pitched as it is at a popular audience and organized in a generally chronological order through a scattered arrangement and meandering pace. But given the Ottoman Empire for so many centuries attempted to hold time still, these topical chapters, moving through time slowly forward while attending to aspects such as The Cage of the prison that became the seraglio, Hoards as to the immense if misplaced wealth of the empire and Shamming regarding the corruption of the state all appear to have been wisely chosen. And as good as Goodwin is at blending political, cultural and military affairs together, his work is distinguished by stylish writing and a sharp eye for just the right anecdote (the epilogue, built as it is around the fate of the empire’s famous stray dogs, is perhaps the best example of an informative and yet moving piece of writing).

There have been other, more exhaustive books on the Ottoman Empire – Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel comes to mind, reviewed on October 12^th, 2012, or The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire by Lord Kinross, reviewed on April 20^th, 2015 – but few have been as esoteric and, thus, insightful as Lords of the Horizons.

“Mapping the World: A History of Exploration” by Peter Whitfield

 

263 pages, The Folio Society

If you’ve never heard of Mapping the World: A History of Exploration by Peter Whitfield it might be because you already own New Found Lands: Maps in the History of Exploration, of which this edition is a reissue. This version, put out by The Folio Society, is stellar (as you’d might expect), printed on buckram paper with a dedicated slipcase. But it is much more than that, for while your typical exploration narrative can be a tale of adventure and endurance, a technical account of navigation and seamanship, or a political history of the overseas empires that were built up in the wake of the explorers, Whitfield took a different approach by focusing on the maps that the explorers themselves used and revealing how both the explorers and their patrons understood their expanding world and their place in it, what they were seeking and how they thought they could achieve it, and how they integrated new knowledge into their evolving world view.

The maps in Mapping the World present the geographical ideas of the time, making plain the power that came with increasing technical and geographical knowledge. They also serve as evocative and poignant reminders of the limited knowledge of these explorers, for up until very recent times (as these maps show) there have been areas of the world remaining to be explored and new found lands to discover. This lavishly illustrated book progresses chronologically, starting with the explorers of the ancient world, covering the East, the New World, the Pacific, Australia and the Modern Era. It will enrich our understanding of the voyages of discovery undertaken over the past 2000 years and will delight any map or history lover (like me). I’m very pleased with myself for renewing my Folio Society membership in whatever year this book was offered and am glad that this ornament to exploration now adorns my bookshelf.

“Legends from the End of Time”, by Michael Moorcock

347 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041899

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Legends from the End of Time was the thirteenth in this series featuring a variety of characters, and includes the tales Pale Roses, White Stars, Ancient Shadows, Constant Fire and Elric at the End of Time. Now, if you read Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time (reviewed on July 30^th, 2024 – and shame on you if you didn’t), then I really can’t say what your reaction will be to this volume, seeing as it is mostly a continuation of that earlier work. While the stories work as stand-alone tales, you really lose something in their telling if you are not at least a little familiar with the backgrounds of these characters from Dancers.

 

Evidently taking time-off between grandiose Epics, Moorcock here offers a five-novella collection of stories that all take place in the oh-so-delightfully decadent End of Time that he introduced in his first collection, The Dancers at the End of Time. It pains me to say it, but getting through this collection was, most of the time, a trial, and I can’t put my finger on just why that is (it also explains why I haven’t individually reviewed the tales in question, like I did for Dancers; I just don’t have the heart, it would seem). These five stories all take place in the same time and setting that Dancers did and during the voyages undertaken by Jherek Carnelian and Amelia Underwood away from the same (thus, neither character really features in any of the tales, apart from one character or another referring to them now and then).

 

The stories themselves take some work, especially seeing that Mavis Ming – a very boring, very real (sadly) character that is difficult if not impossible to warm to – is at the center of so much; it’s as if she were the most-annoying character on a reality TV show who was then given her own spin-off show for no other reason than to desperately try to make her more relevant. It must be said that, in comparison with much of Moorcock’s work, Legends from the End of Time displays a lighter (dare I say, humorous?) touch; one reviewer even described this work as “Woodhouse crossed with Brecht”; don’t know about that, but anyway…sadly, the turgid writing style rather limits whatever lightness there may be, so that the farther you go in the collection the more you feel like you’re running a marathon through knee-deep mud in iron-banded shoes.

 

And all the while I kept reading and dragging myself through book after book, like the demented treasure-hunters on Oak Island, absolutely convinced that with the next book, the next page, the next paragraph I would strike gold – but sadly, all for naught; not even the Fireclown was a godsend, seeing as it was a distortion from the original series. The whole time I read on through some sense of obligation; I mean, Legends from the End of Time is book thirteen out of fifteen, and I’ve come this far, haven’t I? While the whole Eternal Champion mythos is present in a limited form in this work, this book is more of a side-hustle for Moorcock, a kind of literary attachment to his other, more grandiose books with their linked-but-separate stories and mythos. Many characters from those other works appear but, really, these stories really just feel like filler.

 

Except for Elric at the End of Time, which has the honor (?) of being the last Elric story written by Michael Moorcock (although we all know that isn’t true, don’t we?). In this story Elric arrives at the End of Time (having accidentally ejected himself from his native plane during a sorcerous battle; happens to us all, right?) and naturally assumes that he has ended up in the realm of Chaos. He has the misfortune of landing in the middle of a vast sculptural installation by Werther de Goethe, the Last Romantic: a giant skull in which a desert and a snowscape represent “Man’s Foolish Yearnings…His Greed, his Need for the Impossible, the Heat of his Passions, the Coldness which must Finally Overtake him” (the capitals are all Werther’s, which should give you an idea of how pretentious he is). Moorcock’s vivid imagining of the sybaritic society at the End of Time and the prose inflected with late Victorian aestheticism and comedy really works in this story, so different in tone from the other works found in this particular collection. It’s also fun to see Moorcock send up his own creations with genuine affection; the juxtaposition of Werther de Goethe’s innocent Sturm und Drang and Elric’s own heartfelt anguish is irresistible.