PRETTY GIFT BOOKS: THE ATLAS OF ATLASES, a beautiful book perfect for your history and/or map nerd & COLORS OF LONDON, vintage photos of a world city colored perfectly

THE ATLAS OF ATLASES: Exploring the most important atlases in history and the cartographers who made them
PHILIP PARKER
Ivy Press
$40.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: This beatutiful book is a lavishly illustrated look at the most important atlases in history and the cartographers who made them.

Atlases are books that changed the course of history. Pored over by rulers, explorers, and adventures these books were used to build empires, wage wars, encourage diplomacy, and nurture trade.

Written by Philip Parker, an authority on the history of maps, this book brings these fascinating artefacts to life, offering a unique, lavishly illustrated guide to the history of these incredible books and the cartographers behind them.

All key cartographic works from the last half-millennium are covered, including:

The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considered the world’s first atlas and produced in 1570 by the Dutch, geographer Abraham Ortelius,

The 17th-century Klencke—one of the world’s largest books that requires 6 people to carry it,

The Rand McNally Atlas of 1881, still in print today and a book that turned its makers, William H. Rand and Andrew McNally into cartographic royalty.

This beautiful book will engross readers with its detailed, visually stunning illustrations and fascinating story of how map-making has developed throughout human history.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is, on every gifting list, that guy. The one you just...can't...figure...out what to gift. Often they're smart, and deeply interested in something, usually something you've never heard of or think is so boring you'd rather pluck your nose hairs with needlenose pliers than think about.

This is the present you need for that guy, whatever gender they present and/or identify as.

Politics? You damned well better bet that politics-obsessed guy knows about maps and their political implications. Author Parker does, too. There's a huge amount of trouble stirred up in this world by making changes to maps. The Gulf War of 1990 was sparked when Saddam Hussein published a map showing Kuwait as Iraq's nineteenth province. Yes, to be clear, it was an excuse but it passed the sniff test around the world...that is how powerful a map is as a political statement.

India and Pakistan, created from one VAST swathe of land by a few strokes of the Imperial British pen...decades of war over Kashmir being there not here, here not there. Israel? Do I even need to type it? The Toledo Strip in the US? Your politics-obsessed guy

The history guy...the one who, when awakened from sound slumber can rattle off the presidents of the United States in order starting from the ninth (actually pretty interesting, William Henry Harrison, he was...oh, right, back to what I was saying before) or the Khmer Empire's date of foundation (or as close as we can get, anyway, the seventh century CE wasn't a time with hugely good surviving material culture in writing since they didn't have...yeah, yeah, okay) certainly knows what maps really mean in the world.

What better way to chart a culture's opinion of itself and its history, not to mention its future, than to look at its maps? Or maybe even more importantly, who drew or draws its maps and why...the US Government produced the Atlas of the United States on paper until 2007 then digitally until 2014, and now...Google does it. The GPS revolution, the web that Time Berners-Lee imagined and enabled with his hyperlinking technology, all depend on an infrastructure less than half a century old. Atlases and maps are centuries old. Paper is ephemeral, it's true, but pixels are barely even real.

What makes a book like this one so fun for that guy to read is that it's readable. I adored GLOBES: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power when I reviewed it for #Booksgiving in 2017 (and it's still available, in stock and ready to ship!), but it wasn't as readable as this book is. Part of that was the coffee-table-ness and part of it was the brief it set itself. This, too, is a coffee table book but it's got a different brief. The globe is an object with a special history, one that includes the social and historical importance that atlases have, but also a physicality and social statement of power and prestige that requires a denser academic argument than does a maps-and-atlases book. It also has an earlier end-point than does a book of map-making and -publishing history given that we are amid a technological revolution with even greater import to maps and atlases than to globes. They're beautiful objects but their role has become completely virtual with the massive increases in computing power and digital storage technology.

The text of The Atlas of Atlases asks little enough of you to make it possible to skim while sitting around post-gifting and making small talk. There is enough heft to the subjects covered, from Ortelius's first-ever compilation of printed maps that he entitled "Atlas" after the world-supporting Titan of that name in 1570, to Google Maps and its ever-expanding and slightly threatening ubiquity, to keep anyone in this interest group riveted.

The look of surprised happiness on that guy's face as this multi-layered feast for the eyes and the brain is revealed will more than recompense the mere $40 (less if you shop for it) you shell out. Hard to buy for people, when they get this kind of gift, are always so satisfying to please.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

COLORS OF LONDON: A History
PETER ACKROYD
Frances Lincoln Ltd
$40.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five
//
The Publisher Says: Celebrated novelist, biographer, and critic Peter Ackroyd paints a vivid picture of one of the world's greatest cities in this brilliant and original work, exploring how the city's many hues have come to shape its history and identity.

Think of the colors of London and what do you imagine? The reds of open-top buses and terracotta bricks? The grey smog of Victorian industry, Portland stone, and pigeons in Trafalgar square? Or the gradations of yellows, violets, and blues that shimmer on the Thames at sunset—reflecting the incandescent light of a city that never truly goes dark. We associate green with royal parks and the District Line; gold with royal carriages, the Golden Lane Estate, and the tops of monuments and cathedrals.

Colors of London shows us that color is everywhere in the city, and each one holds myriad links to its past. The colors of London have inspired artists (Whistler, Van Gogh, Turner, Monet), designers (Harry Beck) and social reformers (Charles Booth). And from the city’s first origins, Ackroyd shows how color is always to be found at the heart of London’s history, from the blazing reds of the Great Fire of London to the blackouts of the Blitz to the bold colors of royal celebrations and vibrant street life.

This beautifully written book examines the city's fascinating relationship with color, alongside specially commissioned colorised photographs from Dynamichrome, which bring a lost London back to life.

London has been the main character in Ackroyd's work ever since his first novel, and he has won countless prizes in both fiction and non-fiction for his truly remarkable body of work. Here, he channels a lifetime of knowledge of the great city, writing with clarity and passion about the hues and shades which have shaped London's journey through history into the present day.

A truly invaluable book for lovers of art, history, photography, or urban geography, this beautifully illustrated title tells a rich and fascinating story of the history of this great and ever-changing city.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Gifting the Anglophile on your list is always a doddle, right? "Something about England!" the generous, but innocent, gifter thinks. "This will be a snap!"

*cue hollow laughter at callow ignorance*

What part of England...north, south, west, Kent? What time in English history...Thatcher's 1980s, Victoria's imperial experiment, William the Bastard's conquering hordes of French-speaking Vikings? England England or Britain...Britain as a whole, the constituent parts?

I know it's not going to soothe your frazzled last nerve enough to make the idea of a cocktail unnecessary...but there aren't a lot of people who read seriously who haven't heard of, and probably read something by, Peter Ackroyd. He's a cultural monadnock. While one might not adore his prose, or even want to read about his relentlessly centered-on-London stories, it's a whole different kettle of fresh-from-the-Thames eels to think of reading his spear-sharp and sword-long prose about London...accompanied by these startlingly colorized vintage photos of London's past. The firm Dynamichrome makes this its business, and let me tell you that they are clearly destined to be leaders in a revolution for instead of the hitherto prevalent against the colorizing trend. These are images of London from all periods in its history. They're as beautiful as photos of London get. They're also enhanced by the careful and painstaking additions of colors commensurate with the time in history as well as the time of day that they reveal.

The book's organizing principle is seen in the Table of Contents on the recto above presented. Ackroyd's essays, which I suggest is the best way to present and think of these nominal chapters, riff on the colors, the affects, the gestalt of the visual impact of London. The publishers then chose vintage images and Dynamichrome brought their intense, archivally trained eyes to bear on enlivening them with colors appropriate to and emblematic of the times.

Bloody gorgeous, mate.

London's suitability for gifting your Anglophile without getting the weak smile and the slide from a slack, uninterested hand that we all dread is nonpareil. It's been the focus of immense amounts of attention in the moments of history as well as scholarship about that history, so it is readily scannable. It is a major player in the world's economic life, and its social norms have both set and influenced the social norms of many, many countries with past and present ties to it. London isn't England (me, I prefer York, or Chester) but it is called "the Capital" for a reason. It is the head of the government, the home of the economy's engine-controlling bodies, the monarchy's most famous symbols reside there...London is part of the mental furniture of the world's mind.

It's a simple task to find illustrations for a book about London, and an even easier one to gloss over the role of color in Humankind's experience of its world. We are fortunate to have photographic evidence of the reality of London's nineteenth-century past on forward. Beginning just slightly earlier, we have color illustrations of life in London from the eighteenth century. Printing technology has improved and improved in the centuries since Gutenberg married woodblock image-making to moveable type in 1454. That's been a key development in history's accelerating climb into prosperity from subsistence levels to reliable surpluses to wretched excess. Knowledge and ideas are easily transmissible when they're on paper.

They're also ephemeral, and subject to manipulation; they're also incomplete and misleading. But they're less likely to vanish without a trace as, for example, the cure for scurvy did in the sixteenth century when French captain Jacques Cartier heard from Native Americans that his men's scurvy would vanish if he made them drink spruce-needle tisane. It did...but he didn't do much to make it known, and it got lost in archives. Much as that has impacted our view of scurvy's history, the lack of color in vintage photos has made our vision of the past flat and one-dimensional.

We've always lived in a world of color. Nature's colors, but also mankind's. Rescue your Anglophile's imagination from the curse of flat black-and-white thinking with this book. It's vivid, and in its vividness lies its power to inform and to build on our knowledge of one of the world's most important cities: It was always modern, it was always intense, it was always brightly and intensely modern. Celebrate that this Yule gifting season.

PRETTY GIFT BOOKS: BITTERS: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas & JAZZ AGE COCKTAILS: History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Roaring Twenties

JAZZ AGE COCKTAILS: History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Roaring Twenties
CECELIA TICHI
Washington Mews Books/NYU Press
$19.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: How the Prohibition law of 1920 made alcohol, savored in secret, all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker was forced to go “underground”

“Roaring Twenties” America boasted famous firsts: women’s right to vote, jazz music, talking motion pictures, flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The privations of the Great War were over, and Wall Street boomed.

The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment banned “intoxicating liquors.” Decades-long campaigns to demonize alcoholic beverages finally became law, and America officially went “dry.”

American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation’s saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. Passwords (“Oscar sent me”) gave entrée to night spots and supper clubs where cocktails abounded, and bartenders became alchemists of timely new drinks like the Making Whoopee, the Petting Party, the Dance the Charleston. A new social event—the cocktail party staged in a private home—smashed the gender barrier that had long forbidden “ladies” from entering into the gentlemen-only barrooms and cafés.

From the author of Gilded Age Cocktails, this book takes a delightful new romp through the cocktail creations of the early twentieth century, transporting readers into the glitz and (illicit) glamour of the 1920s. Spirited and richly illustrated, Jazz Age Cocktails dazzles with tales of temptation and temperance, and features charming cocktail recipes from the time to be recreated and enjoyed.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A very interesting social history of the life and times in which the cocktail culture arose. I was most impressed with the beautiful book design and illustrations, starting with the frontispiece and title page:

Handsome, easy to read, and very well presented. I'm always happy when I see this level of attention from a publisher. Of course, this is only the very first thing we'll see and thus might not see this level of attention inside. It does happen.

Not in this book. An example of a recipe spread:

and this is a character illustration spread:

Clearly presented text, charming images, and then there's the content. Author Tichi's erudition really shows in her clear prose (not unexpected from a Vanderbilt University lecturer in US History of the Modern Age) and her research is amply documented. What it isn't is cited in the text itself...not a terrible flaw in a popular history aimed at intelligent and curious laypeople. Had her audience been fellow academics, she has the information in her bibliography so she could have made citations with ease.

The extent of Prohibition was a mere thirteen years from enactment and enforcement to repeal. It changed the US forever. So many things we take for granted now...government licensing of food and drink establishments, police with paramilitary powers, a strong political urge to control peoples' personal lives to "improve" their morals...started or accelerated during Prohibition. Author Tichi's own academic interests are defined by these changes and their cultural concomitants in literature, art, and technology. In her afterword, she shares the personal dimension of her interest in the era. It is a well-written work of social history, focusing on social issues that arose or were centered at that time, and still a lovely object suitable for Yule gifting to your brother or father. They'll enjoy the history. They appreciate the cocktails' charmingly presented methods and presentations.

A hardcover book is very much a gift item in this day and time. We've had a few supply-chain issue years what with the COVID plague. The charm of this affordable book is that it's been out for a year-plus now and is in stock...an order placed will be delivered quite quickly. Not a small consideration.

I recommend this as a good gifting idea on a topic of enduring interest. It's solid value for money. And it's readily available.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BITTERS: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas
BRAD THOMAS PARSONS with photos by ED ANDERSON
Ten Speed Press
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Gone are the days when a lonely bottle of Angostura bitters held court behind the bar.

A cocktail renaissance has swept across the country, inspiring in bartenders and their thirsty patrons a new fascination with the ingredients, techniques, and traditions that make the American cocktail so special. And few ingredients have as rich a history or serve as fundamental a role in our beverage heritage as bitters.

Author and bitters enthusiast Brad Thomas Parsons traces the history of the world's most storied elixir, from its earliest "snake oil" days to its near evaporation after Prohibition to its ascension as a beloved (and at times obsessed-over) ingredient on the contemporary bar scene. Parsons writes from the front lines of the bitters boom, where he has access to the best and boldest new brands and flavors, the most innovative artisanal producers, and insider knowledge of the bitters-making process.

Whether you're a professional looking to take your game to the next level or just a DIY-type interested in homemade potables, Bitters has a dozen recipes for customized blends–ranging from Apple to Coffee-Pecan to Root Beer bitters–as well as tips on sourcing ingredients and step-by-step instructions fit for amateur and seasoned food crafters alike.

Also featured are more than seventy cocktail recipes that showcase bitters' diversity and versatility: classics like the Manhattan (if you ever get one without bitters, send it back), old-guard favorites like the Martinez, contemporary drinks from Parsons's own repertoire like the Shady Lane, plus one-of-a-kind libations from the country's most pioneering bartenders. Last but not least, there is a full chapter on cooking with bitters, with a dozen recipes for sweet and savory bitters-infused dishes.

Part recipe book, part project guide, part barman's manifesto, Bitters is a celebration of good cocktails made well, and of the once-forgotten but blessedly rediscovered virtues of bitters.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is a classic gift book for the Dad who drinks, has all his basic needs met, and still you need to hand him something under the Yule tree. The book won the 2012 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Beverages. It's not as much a history of the concept of "bitters" as it is a practical guide to using bitters in drinks and food, as well as lovely images of what they could look like.

the back cover with its celebrity endorsements

From my point of view this is the kind of gift that serves your need to acknowledge Dad/father-in-law, his need to expand or polish hs repertiore, and both of y'all to get a good drink.

There are several other food recipes, and the page layout...sorry, no samples are available online...has a column on the outside dedicated to ingredient lists with the illustrations and methods lined up on the inner page gutters. It works to make the usability of the recipes, whether for drinks or desserts, fine for use with book-stands. A nice touch, typical of the publisher; and it translates well to Kindle editions.

THE VIKING HISTORY PAGE: THE WOLF AGE, first Scandinavian-authored Viking history in English & CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM, distinguished archaeologist writes

THE WOLF AGE: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire
TORE SKEIE (tr. Alison McCullough)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Thrilling history provides a new perspective on the Viking-Anglo Saxon conflicts and brings the bloody period vividly to life, perfect for fans of Dan Jones

The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English, The Wolf Age reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts readers in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for.

Tore Skeie ("Norway's Most Important Young Historian") takes readers on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia.

Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder.

This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This Norwegian historian's viewpoint on the rise and spread of the late-Viking-era North Sea empire. The seeds of this immense stretch of territory coming under one ruler were set in the attacks of Harald Gormsson, King of Denmark, (whom we call "Bluetooth" and yes, he's the source of the name of the wireless connectivity protocol on your phone) on the rich and peaceful (therefore ripe for robbery) Anglo-Saxon Kingdom(s). His wars against the neighboring Saxon Kingdom along the Baltic Sea coast were costly, and even resulted in his loss of control over Norway; much money for rearming and hiring mercenaries was needed and, well, Anglaland ho! Alas, his death came before he could finish a war of conquest in what is today a coastal region of Poland.

Aethelred the Redeless, who fought Harald and Sweyn his whole life, on his coinage
We don't see much of Harald in English-language histories, but he was more than the raiding monarch seeking silver to pay for his wars. He was also the one who introduced a centralized coinage for Denmark, guaranteeing its value would always be the same wherever one was paid in it. And one means of assuring that? Go get silver from someone else. The English have lots! And so it came to pass that the immensity of the North Sea became the middle ground between two halves of one empire...in fact, for a brief time, and in imagination for a longer one.

Harald's son Sweyn (opponent of "Saint" Olaf Haraldsson for the title of King of Norway, who is pictured above), after successfully rebelling against him, continued his father's efforts to unite the coasts of the North Sea under his family. A period of uncertainty in his rule before his first reported raid on the murderers of his kinsfolk in their midst (the appalling St Brice's Day massacre!) beginning a long campaign of looting and terror against the English. This campaign turned into occupation; the occupation turned into becoming the King of the English in 1013. Leaving England in the hands of his second son, he hurried off to fight another war...and died before 1015.

He was thus not as successful as was his own son, King Canute as he is known in English and Cnut the Great at home (his coin portrait is at the right). He ruled all three kingdoms, Norway from 1028, Denmark from 1018, and England from 1015, for twenty years and made a decent fist of it. What happened, as happened to most all territorially great empires, was just the reality of physics. In an era without motorized transport, the chances of maintaining control over a huge swath of territory are not great. Cnut did not overcome the odds, dying in 1035 with England still barely under his control. His descendants continued to cherish hopes of reacquiring England until Edward the Confessor died in 1066, when Harald Hardrada was killed with his army at the Battle of Stamford Bridge defending his, um, very (very) extended family's claim on the wealthy English realm. This was the last gasp of the North Sea Empire as envisioned by Harald Gormsson a century before.

The territorial drive of the father, son, and grandsons wasn't out of character; wasn't unusually violently for the era; and is ripe for reconsideration by English-language readers to account for our lamentable tendency to simply unsee the viewpoints of others on our shared histories. This volume is the first translated, for the most part skilfully, into English. I'd say the one concerning lacuna in this rendering into English of a popular history written in Norwegian is the use of colloquially still prevalent "Anglo-Saxon" in reference to the people, not the culture, of England from the 6th through 11th centuries. It's established through the use of genomics that the people of England are still largely Britons. It's a minor cavil in a work of popular history.

More frustrating to me is the lack of maps in the DRC. There are (see above) very nice black-and-white illustrations at the chapter opens but in my DRC, there weren't maps and, in any history text that discusses battles, that is a serious omission. I am aware that there are indeed maps in your final copies, I hasten to say, but I haven't seen them and can't comment on their effectiveness at conveying information they're meant to. I left off only a half-star in my rating, however, because that lack was both unique to the DRC and somewhat compensated for by the sheer pleasure of reading the skillfully translated text. Alison McCullough deserves much praise. While there is a sense of the original text's depth of scholarship, the primary affect of this book is one of absorbing, intelligent conversation overheard by the reader...not all the references or historical figures will stay in one's mind, available for instant recall, but even at lazier moments when I didn't feel like chasing a reference or an actor in the endnotes, or the "Overview of Persons" as this text charmingly calls the Dramatis Personae, I was carried along by what felt to me like very readable, accessible prose. Enough explanation was offered to my non-specialist brain to enable me to move forward with a real sense of the ethos in which events transpired.

Overall, the point of a book such as this...a lovely illustrated trade-paper edition of popular history about the pre-Norman Conquest world of England...is to please and intrigue the history buff on your gifting list. (Or you, of course.) I feel confident that it will serve that purpose.

Pushkin Press continues its streak of fascinating, unusual in the US, points of view presented in beautiful and pleasurable format.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM: A History of the Vikings
NEIL PRICE
Basic Books
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The definitive history of the Vikings—from arts and culture to politics and cosmology—by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise

The Viking Age—from 750 to 1050—saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed.

From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Far broader in scope than The Wolf Age reviewed above, this is the most compact (at under 650 pages) and the most comprehensive overview I've ever read of the "Viking Age" Norse as we here to their South call the multiple groups of Scandinavian traders, slavers, warriors, and rapists who burst the seams of their colossally cold homeland in search of new lands and lots of money. Spoiler alert: they got them.

If the data from the Continental written sources is combined, the protection money paid to the Vikingsduring the ninth century totalled about thirty thousand pounds' weight of silver, most of it in cash: a sum equivalent to seven million silver pennies over a period when the estimated total output of the Frankish mints was in the region of fifty million coins. This equates to approximately 14 percent of the entire monetary output of the Frankish empire—for a century—evaporated in the payment of extortion demands that produced no tangible positive gain, and, in many cases, failed to appease the Vikings anyway.

(italics in the original)

There is so much to unpack in that passage...it's shockingly obvious that appeasement is seldom a worthwhile strategy, and is always an expensive one; the reputation of the Norse people as warriors was such that they merely needed to show up to be given boatloads of money to go away again; and the tribute in kind, not just the cash they brought home, kept the balance of hunger on the rightful owners of the land and food not the invaders. The Frankish kingdom, then, was more changed by its experience of Viking invasion than was even England, though both countries saw significant influxes of Norse population, arriving to make the country their home...with variable amounts of success. (See above for St. Brice's Massacre.)

That is all part of the middle, or "Viking" era that this volume is divided into. The first part of the text is called the "Migration" era. It is the time that saw huge cultural and climatic changes in Europe. There was pressure to find land to farm and patches of sea to exploit during this time, as well as the successor states to the Roman Empire arising and contending with each other for influence and territory. And ending the book is a kind of summation of the influence this phenomenally active and successful force in the world.

I was delighted to have the maps to help me interpret the movements and stations of Norse cultural expansion. I was also impressed wt the copiousness of the in-line illustrations. It is expensive to make a book this attractive and it's not a terribly pricey purchase at $35 for a hardcover. Basic Books has done a creditable job of this without making it a coffee-table book or a category-gift book.

Author Neil Price is a professional archaeologist. It is evident from the tone and tenor of his writing that his primary interest is in making you aware of the facts; he doesn't make the same amount of effort with the storytelling aspects of his writing. I've excerpted one of the typical passages where he's clearly making the effort to show the reader how phenomenally effective the Vikings were at their chosen task of redistributing others' wealth back to themselves. It's a fact, presented factually, that conveys a gigantic emotive affect of the Viking warriors. It is laudably clear; it is admirably placed for effect within the text (you'll have to trust me on that one); but it doesn't rise as high into the rhetorical clouds as Author Tore's book does.

It is, as a gift item, a good value; as a gift received, a real pleasure on all levels. It's a hefty tome, though, so for your friends whose needs are more for thinner reads, the ebook is a dead cheap choice!

Either way anyone wanting an accessible, enjoyable, and thoroughgoing overview of the Vikings as historical actors is in luck this Yule.

RED SKY MORNING: The Epic True Story of Texas Ranger Company F, the kind of focused-on-a-story history that fascinates my Texas-rooted self

RED SKY MORNING: The Epic True Story of Texas Ranger Company F
JOE PAPPALARDO
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The explosive and bloody true history of Texas Rangers Company F, made up of hard men who risked their lives to bring justice to a lawless frontier.

Between 1886 and 1888, Sergeant James Brooks, of Texas Ranger Company F, was engaged in three fatal gunfights, endured disfiguring bullet wounds, engaged in countless manhunts, was convicted of second-degree murder, and rattled Washington, D.C. with a request for a pardon from the US president. His story anchors the tale of Joe Pappalardo's Red Sky Morning, an epic saga of lawmen and criminals set in Texas during the waning years of the “Old West.”

Alongside Brooks are the Rangers of Company F, who range from a pious teetotaler to a cowboy fleeing retribution for killing a man. They are all led by Captain William Scott, who cut his teeth as a freelance undercover informant but was facing the end of his Ranger career. Company F hunted criminals across Texas and beyond, killing them as needed, and were confident they could bring anyone to “Ranger justice.” But Brooks’ men met their match in the Conner family, East Texas master hunters and jailbreakers who were wanted for their part in a bloody family feud.

The full story of Company F’s showdown with the Conner family is finally being told, with long dead voices being heard for the first time. This truly hidden history paints the grim picture of neighbors and relatives becoming snitches and bounty hunters, and a company of Texas Rangers who waded into the conflict only to find themselves over their heads—and in the fight of their lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll start by lauding what other readers have liked least about this book: It is a mosaic of multiple stories, and intentionally so. The design of a history that's focused on a story, not a biography, is to collate the fascinating pieces and ugly, disfiguring truths that make up the whole picture of the moment in question...it's meant to be taken in piece by piece, and assembled in one's mental theater as a whole image of The Defining Conflict.

To that end, we meet the main main, James Brooks, as he surveys Cotulla, Texas, on the day he joins the Texas Rangers in 1883. Author Pappalardo begins, then, at a beginning...but we're going to see other beginnings as we go along. We'll see the last of active Rangers Captain Brooks in Cotulla, too...and that's the kind of symmetry I appreciate in a story.

What happens between those two events, not hugely distant in time, is...a lot. A great deal more than one person's life generally holds, and a great deal less as well. Brooks, in his entire life of genuine service to the people of Texas, never shook a debilitating addiction to alcohol and an equally debilitating inability to form sustaining, intimate friendships with anyone. This included, as it is so sad to say, his own family. He was married to one woman his entire adult life. There is no record or indication in any recorded memory that he found any sense of companionship or happiness in their union, nor did she express any enduring or undying affection for her husband. His children were dutiful, and always played their role of help and sustenance for him, but again there is not any record of them feeling hero-worship for their truly outsized and outstanding father.

Brooks County, named for the Captain (as he always preferred to be referred to and addressed despite having the options of Representative or Judge), was a creation of the remarkable man's efforts to drag a thousand square miles of mesquite scrub and caliche and its few thousand residents out of the hands of a corrupt Democratic party machine in the early twentieth century. He was, at the time, a State Representative, and his life-long campaign of fair treatment for Spanish-speaking people and law-abiding souls of all skin colors and ethnicities made Brooks County and Falfurrias havens of good, equitable Democratic-party led government.

In the chapter dedicated to this end-of-life résumé of Brooks, there are résumés of his cohorts in Company F, all of whom were with the Captain during the main action of the book...the take-down of the Sabine County-based Conner crime family in the weird swampy Louisiana-like East Texas world. It was a long, tense fight on the logistical and legal levels, and Author Pappalardo doesn't stint on the practical details. There are a LOT of people in this story. There are a LOT of names that appear, then aren't mentioned for a while, then reappear with minimal fanfare. There is a Dramatis Personae that can be bookmarked or hyperlinked in your ereader, and I strongly suggest that any readers do that very thing. I found it hugely helpful and on occasion, to my utter lack of surprise, its completeness and thoroughgoing explanatory notes were interesting enough to make me want more books about this century-old vanished culture.

What I want from histories is a sense of the why of things. The what is great as a launchpad but I really treasure whys. In that arena, Author Pappalardo is a strong deliverer. I was never at a loss for reasons to pick up the book. I took it at a measured pace, a chapter a week and a section or two a day. I think this is the most likely technique to give the story its full room to expand and its details to slot into each others' proper settings. Since I am from Texas, I was prepared with some ideas of the roles of lawmen, and specifically the Texas Rangers, in the state's history. Since I am from that part of Texas, it was even more of a sense of homecoming, of learning my own family's cultural past. That added soupçon of personal connection is likely the source of the extra half-star I hung on the book.

It really is extra, as I can understand from others' responses to the read. Quite a few readers were unable to see the nature of the story being told and that is squarely on the author's shoulders. His stated aim is to answer this quote from one N.A. Jennings, a former Texas Ranger of that time and later an author in his own right:

"Near everyone has heard of the Texas Rangers, but how many know what the Rangers really are, or what are their duties? In a general way, everyone knows they are men who ride around on the Texas border, do a good deal of shooting, and now and then get killed or kill someone. But why they ride around, or why they do the shooting, is a question which might go begging for an answer for a long time without getting a correct one."

This expectation being set in the Introduction, I can see a history buff feeling let down. This isn't the book that answers that question. It doesn't seem to me to be particularly likely to, set up as it is to tell the story of a group of Rangers involved in one of the organization's formative operations. The personal focus falls most heavily, and in my opinion correctly so, on the Captain, James A. Brooks, and the people he led come in for bits and snatches of attention. But the light that shed on the Texas Rangers as a whole, while bright and revealing, does not get even partway to explaining the entire late-1800s period of the organization's existence that Author Pappalardo indicated it will.

But what the book actually does is, to my way of thinking at least, as valuable or even more so. It traces the roots and the branches of a conflict between the law-and-order forces of state power and the flouters of same whose actions and influence were seriously detrimental to the community as a whole's ability to live their lives free from fear and danger. There are people worse than police today, there were in the 1880s, and the worst is when those terrible actors turn the police into their henchmen. Along come the Texas Rangers of Company F to reset the expectations of the community for law enforcement...and they do.

For the better.

It might not be what we think of in terms of law enforcement's role today, after Rodney King's beating and George Floyd's and Ahmaud Arbery's murders at their hands; but it is true, it happened, and it's worth considering that if it seemed impossible to the people of Sabine County in 1885, and it wasn't, that it isn't impossible today either.

That deserves my attention, and my praise.