Below The Beltway

If you’ve been checking out the Book Reviews, you’ll know I’ve been reading alot of Harry Turtledove lately.
It started with his alternate history Civil War novel The Guns Of The South. Almost exclusively, though, its been the books in the Timeline-191 universe. That’s one reason I looked forward to reading In The Presence Of Mine [...]

Sixty-five years ago today, World War II took a turn to the East:
At 4:45 am on June 22, 1941, the Axis attacked. It is difficult to precisely pinpoint the strength of the opposing sides in this initial phase, as most German figures include reserves slated for the East but not yet committed, as well as [...]

Harry Turtledove could have just as easily titled this final volume of the American Empire series The Triumph of Evil, because that is exactly the story unfolds over the seven years that the story that unfolds covers.
The book opens where the last volume, The Center Cannot Hold, left off. Jake Featherston, possessing a political philosophy, [...]

Its Volume Two of the American Empire series, and things are not well for pretty much anyone in the Timeline-191 universe. And that is the story that American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
The United States, content with its victory in the Great War, has settled into a period of foriegn policy complacency. The Confederate States, [...]

In this first book of the American Empire series, Harry Turtledove abandons a pattern that he had followed since the first book in the so-called Timeline-191 series. This time, there is no Second Mexican War, no Great War raging across the North American continent. Instead, this book focuses on the roughly seven year time period [...]

The year is 1862. The month is September. The Army of Northern Virginia has just defeated the Army of the Potomac for the second time at Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia. Now, Robert E. Lee has decided to take the fight across the Mason-Dixon Line. The Army of Northern Virginia crosses into Maryland, threatening Washington [...]

I am about 200 pages away from the end of Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain. Like The Guns Of The South, which I read in August it is about an alternate American history where the South won the Civil War. Unlike that first novel, though, the victory in this case came as a result of [...]

Virtually every historian, amateur or professional, has asked the question — What if ? What if Hannibal had not made it across the Alps ?
What if Germany had won the Battle of Britain ?
What if the South had won the Civil War ?
That’s the question Harry Turtledove tries to answer in The Guns of The [...]

Due mostly to busy weekends and long chapters, its taking me longer to get through The Guns of the South than I had anticpated. I’m only about 150 pages into it at this point and the action is really just starting to unfold.
I’m not giving anything away in revealing that the basic premise of the [...]

Well, all the fears about yesterday’s shutdown of a portion of the Beltway were apparently unfoudned. Kellie and I were driving North on I-95 last night just before the area where the detour began and there was no noticeable effect on traffic. Even better, it turns out that the project finished a day ahead of [...]