Emmanuel Gustin > Recent Status Updates

A slow read but really useful. Thorough, perhaps a bit too much so.

Picked it up again — and OMG. He never uses one word when he can use three. There is at least one triplet in every sentence. This books needs translation into a real language.

If you remember some of the plot, the way Saylor plays with the clues is still entertaining.

Slow. So far I am unimpressed by the number of vague observations without a mechanistic analysis.

Not getting much better.

Some of the dialogue is rather forced. But overall very enjoyable.

The writing style is either becoming less verbose, or am getting used to it. But the very wide scope of these chapters and the fragmentary approach to documenting evolution in human thinking easily leads to a suspicion of cherry-picking from the sources those elements that fit his narrative.

It is interesting but marred by a boring writing style. Frankopan can never resist the urge to use two verbs were one would have sufficed, and three adjectives where you would question the need for one. It reads like a press release by a large corporation or a government department.

At this point the author is musing about the possibility that the war could have been ended by a negotiated peace in 1917. Sort of apportioning blame: The Central powers started the war, but the Entente chose to continue it. Maybe but this is the ethical advantage of being on the losing side.

It’s a fun adventure story, but as a fantasy story, it lacks an engaging mythos. There is a backstory, yes, with some characters attached to it, but the way it is presented fails to grasp my attention.

An interesting account but I would wish that it dug a bit deeper to not the background. So far not much that is really new.

Page 32 of the Dutch translation, and “Corsairs” has been mistranslated as “Corsicans”. An ill omen.

A fantasy story with Dead, Bells, Cats, Soldiers, Swords, Machine Guns, and Tanks. The imaginative reach of Nix is impressive. His characters suffer from a lack of psychological depth, but you can’t have everything.

Because the information about the early years and career of Toussaint is scarce, the story on these first chapters is a bit speculative. Interesting, but with gaps.

The pace picks up, and it all becomes much more entertaining as the author serves up the conspiracy theories in which Austrian and Russian governments freely indulged, and the cast of sordid characters who profited from this tendency.

The long series of poorly substantiated claims is just tedious. And “poorly substantiated” is generous. At around page 366, Lambert is indulging himself in a fast summary of 20th century naval strategy that demonstrates all too convincingly that strong opinions are an inadequate substitute for knowledge.

It is getting more interesting. The argumentation in favour of the superiority of the German war economy is confusing, however, and vague.

Economic history is part of the truth but it is not the whole truth. So far Ferguson has given an impressive overview of the statistics, but has failed to adequately explain why Germany went to war, I think because he ignored too many other factors.

Enjoyable in its retelling offers and panics, and its recalling of real and imagined conspiracies and secret societies.

Still rather tedious in its profusion of claims and judgments, not backed up by much in the way of facts or arguments. The author clearly divides states in two groups: The ones that he likes, and the ones that he does not. But it seems very subjective indeed.

It is almost Mahanian in its ambitions, but quite remarkably tedious in its realisation. An endless sequence of bold claims and interpretations, with too little to back them up.