Author: sonofsagan

Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence is an unparalleled resource for introducing the major issues, figures, and periods of post-independence African history, but is severely marred by its failure to engage the devastating legacies of colonialism on the continent.

Sharon Kay Penman's Here By Dragon is a classic of historical fiction, offering a rich, complex tapestry of medieval Welsh and Anglo-Norman life, with a unique narrative style that decenters the big moments and focuses on domestic life and character psychology, and has a lot to say about medieval women's lives.

The 2023 narrative cooking game Venba by new studio Visai Games punches above its weight in art, sound, and soundtrack, and tells an endearing story of a Tamil family and foodways.

Andrew Robinson's India: A Short History is a worthwhile and chronologically balance, but critically flawed, abbreviation of 5,000 years of Indian history that raises questions about how best to tell such a complicated story in such a short span.

Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers steps into the world of fairy tales that are well-known across the West to recover the stories behind those tales’ tellers, but in doing so obscures the scholarship that made this book possible.

Naomi Novik's third book in the Temeraire series, Black Powder War, takes readers to the Ottoman and German empires during the Napoleonic wars, but fails to explore its subject in interesting ways and leans heavily into Orientalist tropes.