Book Review: Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski

Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, a human given up as a child to be supernaturally mutated so as to fight monsters that endangered humanity, but he is a “dying” breed. Sword of Destiny is the second story collection by Andrzej Sapkowski that follows the adventures of Geralt in a chronological fashion that will lead to the main Witcher Saga.

The six stories in the collection are loosely linked in chronology and two are directly linked to one story in the previous collection that will bear directly on the upcoming Saga. Throughout the stories, Geralt becomes more complex, and his world gets bigger through a lot more human, as we see that the witchers overall had been doing their job very well. Yet it’s the last two stories that are directly linked with one another as the reader is introduced to Ciri, whose existence was hinted at in the previous volume. Half of the stories are very good with the beginning and final stories among them, though the best of the lot was “Eternal Flame”. Only one story was just fine and that was “A Shard of Ice” which features Geralt and his relationship with Yennifer and a major downgrade to their story in the previous volume. Overall Sapkowski gave Geralt more character and weaved together various story threads that the reader will be looking forward to seeing how they develop in the bigger Witcher Saga.

Sword of Destiny is a good collection of short stories with half of the stories very good and only that was “just fine”.

The Bounds of Reason (4/5)
A Shard of Ice (2.5/5)
Eternal Flame (4.5/5)
A Little Sacrifice (3/5)
The Sword of Destiny (3.5/5)
Something More (4/5)

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Book Review: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated by Eric H. Cline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Their world was connected through trade, diplomacy, and cultural cross-pollination but within a lifetime everything changed. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed sees Eric H. Cline unveil the prosperous Late Bronze Age of the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt and theorizes about how they disappeared from history or were weakened apparently out of nowhere.

Using a variety of disciplines, from archaeology to linguistics, Cline shows the reader the world of the Late Bronze Age and the cultures that dominated it and their relationships with one another in an ever-increasing interconnectedness. Yet as Cline goes on to show this interconnectedness was also it’s down fall as natural disasters, climate change, internal and external migration, and numerous other factors that could have been weathered individually created a “perfect storm” of events that caused the international system to collapse. Cline doesn’t shy away from engaging in the long-held belief that the “Sea Peoples” were responsible for the collapse but shows how those migrates were reacting to the world falling apart and either taking advantage or running away to find stability. Throughout 187 pages, Cline packs in a lot of facts and speculations besides the confirmed history on events that could point to the truth of Troy and maybe the Exodus, though his speculation on the latter is weaker than the former.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a very fact dense book that is aimed for a general audience, but inquisitive and ready to get into nitty gritty of knowledge. Eric H. Cline knows his subject and is able to communicate it fairly well on page, but not as well as he comes across in lectures or presentations.

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Book Review: Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Arab ambassador finds himself headed to the lands of the Northmen against his will to help fight an evil menace. Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton is a historical fiction retelling of the Old English poem Beowulf as seen through the eyes of real-life noted Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan.

Conceived to make the story of the hero Beowulf not boring, Crichton combined the real-life experiences of a historical traveler and imagined how he would have written an account of the original poem in his own style. Narrated as if a scientific commentary on an old manuscript, Crichton created an interesting take the well-known story as well as making the antagonists relic Neanderthals which at the time of the original publication were emerging from under the shadow of the Victorian description of “brutish primitives”. Given my reading of annotated history texts, I found this book right down my personal lane and the fact that I watched the adaptation, The 13th Warrior, meant that it would have had to be awful for me to dislike it.

Eaters of the Dead is a different way to look at the epic tale of Beowulf and was impressively written by Michael Crichton.

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Book Review: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He is a beast hunter given supernatural abilities at a young age to battle wild beasts and monsters, he is a witcher and his name is Geralt of Rivia. The Last Wish is the short story collection by Andrzej Sapkowski that follows the adventures of his creation Geralt and the world he lives in.

The seven stories are connected via “The Voice of Reason” which is used as a framing story as either the aftermath of the Sapkowski’s original short story, “The Witcher”, or as an introductory device for the other stories before ending the collection. All the stories a good, though the standouts are clearly “A Gain of Truth”, “A Question of Price”, and the collection’s titular story, “The Last Wish”. Geralt instantly comes across as interesting character that the reader would want to follow and over the course of the collection, the reader is introduced to other great characters that Geralt interact with some of which will be important later in Sapkowski’s larger saga. Using Slavic mythology given his Polish background, Sapkowski bring additional creatures to the reader attention that is usually more familiar with Western European fantasy tropes and Sapkowski’s use of twisting or subverting known fairy tales and tropes gives another dimension to his writing.

The Last Wish turned out to be a great way to be introduced to Andrzej Sapkowski’s world of The Witcher.

The Witcher (3.5/5)
A Grain of Truth (5/5)
The Lesser Evil (3/5)
A Question of Price (4.5/5)
The Edge of the World (3.5/5)
The Last Wish (4.5/5)
The Voice of Reason (3.5/5)

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Book Review: The Age of Faith by Will Durant

The Age of Faith by Will Durant
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The death of two men bookends the Middle Ages, one transformed the Roman Empire by injecting Christianity into the government and the other was the man who ended the reign of Latin in the literature of Italy to produce the greatest of medieval Christian books. The Age of Faith is the fourth volume of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization series focusing on the end of the Western Roman Empire, the rise of Christian Europe, the zenith and slow decline of Byzantium, the birth and stagnation of Islamic civilization, and the continued resilience of Jewish faith and culture.

Unlike the previous volumes of the series, Durant does not need a prologue to introduce anything as the volume beings where the ends the death of Constantine. Over the course of a millennium from the death of the first Christian emperor to the death of Dante the champion of vernacular Italian and champion of the dream of a unified Italy. For Durant this millennium isn’t all about Christianity, but the rise and continuation of the Abrahamic religions so the rise of Islam and the blooming of Islamic civilization as well as the continuation of Judaism are significant portions of the volume and whose contributions would be interwoven into the medieval fabric in the 12th and 13th centuries. However, three-quarters of the volume shows how Christianity fought against, preserved, and built upon the classical heritage of Greece and Roman to form medieval Christendom in culture, science, art, and political theories. Yet, as with previous volumes Durant’s word usage can be problematic though as well as distaste for religion when comparing/contrasting it to philosophy even though he praises the sincerity of those that live their faith while showing the twists and turns of theological development that intertwined what those in power thought was orthodoxy in opposition to those who thought differently. Durant demonstrates that modern Europe is essentially still medieval either as it’s extension of classic antiquity that would birth the Renaissance or it’s civilized barbarity that would bring about a Reformation.

The Age of Faith was a millennium of decline, rebirth, preservation, innovation, of change and stability that was needed in Will Durant’s view before the coming of an “age of reason” that would bring about modernity.

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