Blogs about: Roberts Reviews
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History With a Wide Lens(Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World – Justin Marozzi)
Popular history is a tough field. The broad target audience usually precludes meticulous, detail-oriented research and analysis. Historical fidelity forbids (or should forbid) the imagination of specu… more →
Idle Trade
History With a Wide Lens(Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World – Justin Marozzi)
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Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: Popular history is a tough field. The broad target audience usually precludes meticulous, detail-ori … more →
A World of Possibilities (Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: Near-future science fiction writers have a difficult task. They have to make their worlds different … more →
A Fable About Writing Overambitious Fables (The Alchemist – Paolo Coehlo)
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Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: [Sorry about the long break since my last post. With finals, graduation, moving, and getting set up … more →
The Perils of Political Fiction (Shalimar the Clown - Salman Rushdie)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: Conveying a political message through quality fiction is a difficult task. Salman Rushdie’s latest o … more →
Ancient Chinese Wisdom (Chuang Tzu)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: A sad fact is that the best known Chinese philosophers are often the least original and challenging. … more →
The Virus (The Geographer's Library - Jon Fasman)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: Phase 1: Infection It happened to me last summer. I walked into the living room of my apartment to s … more →
Condimentary History (Salt: A World History - Mark Kurlansky)
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Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: Few materials have undergone a transformation as dramatic as salt’s. For thousands of years, it was … more →
Protagonist Ex Machina (Ascent – Jed Mercurio)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: What if there was a man with exceptional gifts driven by a fierce desire to be a legend? Any reader … more →
A Long March (The Road - Cormac McCarthy)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: The genre of the postapocalyptic has spawned a wide assortment of works: classics like A Canticle fo … more →
Lies My Narrator Told Me (Baudolino - Umberto Eco)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: Any postmodernist worth his salt could dash off a quick essay on the importance of myths and legends … more →
A Book Whose Time Has Come and Gone (White Noise – Don DeLillo)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: I almost never give up on books after I start them. I hate it. But I couldn’t finish White Noi … more →
Truth is in the Eye of the Beholder (David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: If, as Philip K. Dick once noted, characters drive novels and plot drives short stories, what drives … more →
Bad Writing Done Right (Eragon - Christopher Paolini)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: Eragon might be the worst book that I love. Despite its impressive sales and young author (Christoph … more →
Courage, Serenity, and Wisdom (A Connecticut Yankee - Mark Twain)
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: We often recall that Jules Verne wrote about spaceships before they were invented or that George Orw … more →
The Looking Glass War - John Le Carré
Robert Beard wrote 2 years ago: John Le Carré is justly famous for his ability to describe the bleakness of Cold War Europe behind t … more →
