Stuart Ellis-Gorman (Author of The Medieval Crossbow)

Stuart liked Andrew's review of The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King: "A fun book with real scholarship and a lot of interesting factoids. It doesn't have a holistic narrative that really ties everything together, but it is an argument for viewing the crossbow in more nuanced terms that defy our standard models for maki" Read more of this review »
Jul 22, 2026 01:46AM · see review
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Jul 21, 2026 08:22PM · like · see status
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Jul 19, 2026 12:03AM · like
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Apparently my review is too many characters for Goodreads, but you can read it on my website at https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blo... ...more
Jul 08, 2026 11:58PM · like · see review
Stuart rated a book it was amazing Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History by Bruce Cumings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I was really impressed with Bruce Cumings’ history of the Korean War, and I was looking for a good general history of Korea, so it didn’t take much of a recommendation to push me towards grabbing a copy of Korea’s Place in the Sun. This is a history ...more
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Stuart rated a book liked it This is Free Trader Beowulf: a System History of Traveller by Shannon Appelcline (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I’ve never played Traveller, which makes it a little weird that I decided to read a pretty lengthy history of the game. However, I have an ongoing fascination with the history of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and I want to expand from my knowle ...more
Jul 08, 2026 11:55PM · like · see review
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Stuart rated a book really liked it The Underground Village by Kang Kyeong-ae	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Powerful writing, incredibly bleak. Glad I read it, I dont intend to do so a second time.
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Stuart liked Andrew's review of The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King:

The Medieval Crossbow by Stuart Ellis-Gorman

"A fun book with real scholarship and a lot of interesting factoids. It doesn't have a holistic narrative that really ties everything together, but it is an argument for viewing the crossbow in more nuanced terms that defy our standard models for maki" Read more of this review »

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All Hell Let Loose: The World at War, 1939-1945
by Max Hastings

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by Max Hastings

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Madagascar 1942: Operation Ironclad and the Fight against Vichy France (Campaign, 438)
by Angus Konstam

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Behind Five Willows
by June Hur (Goodreads Author)

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Wargames According to Mark
by Mark Herman

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Apparently my review is too many characters for Goodreads, but you can read it on my website at https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blo... ...more

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Korea's Place in the Sun by Bruce Cumings

Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History
by Bruce Cumings

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I was really impressed with Bruce Cumings’ history of the Korean War, and I was looking for a good general history of Korea, so it didn’t take much of a recommendation to push me towards grabbing a copy of Korea’s Place in the Sun. This is a history I was really impressed with Bruce Cumings’ history of the Korean War, and I was looking for a good general history of Korea, so it didn’t take much of a recommendation to push me towards grabbing a copy of Korea’s Place in the Sun. This is a history of modern Korea, primarily focused on 1850-2000, but it includes a decent overview of Korea’s earlier history in its opening chapter. This is because Cumings wants to emphasize how long Korea has existed as a single nation, because it is essential to understanding the impact of first Japanese colonization and then the division between north and south on the Korean psyche and modern history. Overall, I was really impressed with Korea’s Place in the Sun, it is an engaging if dense history of a fascinating country that does its best to take some very complex topics and make them easier to understand.

I imagine to some Cumings is a bit of a radical in his historical takes. This does not surprise me – his history of the Korean War devoted more time to war crimes and abuses than it did to heroic last stands and small unit American tactics. That choice is part of why I liked that book so much, and I really appreciated his willingness to question established narratives and remind us of the dark side of history. As someone who is generally inclined towards skepticism, and being generally a bit annoying when constructing historical narratives, I enjoy it when other historians pick away at established ideas.

The opening chapter explaining the early history of Korea is one of the best summaries I have read of early Korean history. I think it manages to do more in less than Eugene Park’s book, which tried to be a history of all of Korea but never quite dug in as deep as I wanted. I feel like I have a much better understanding of the Three Kingdoms and Joseon eras, especially the way they laid the framework for modern Korea. I find it particularly fascinating how the Baekche and Silla divisions were recreated in the 20th century under the dictators, who were all from the part of Korea that had once been Silla, and the tension that created with the more leftist south-west, former Baekche. As a fan of historical memory as a subject, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this parallel.

The section covering the 1800s was well structured, but a little harder for me to follow. Cumings digs deep into the Neo-Confucianist philosophy that defined Joseon politics and how it attempted to reform itself over centuries, but was ultimately unable to adapt to the world that Korea faced in the late 1800s. This is all important stuff, but Neo-Confucianist philosophy is pretty dense and I sometimes struggled to keep track of who was who in this complex web of kings, philosophers, bureaucrats, and other political actors. The big picture was easier to follow, but please don’t ask me to explain any of it!

The middle of the book is almost an economic history, where the Japanese colonization’s industrializing elements are examined, followed by the “Miracle on the Han” narrative of South Korea’s dictatorships. I’m usually not wild about economic history, but Cumings kept it interesting and never got too lost in the money. The human side is always remembered, and even as he tells this economic narrative he never stops criticizing overly simplistic examinations of the period (both in discussing Japanese collaboration and economics, and then in how the “Miracle on the Han” was achieved at great cost to the people and in violation of expected economic rules).

The final sections of the book first cover South Korea thematically, it’s economy and then the fight for democracy in two back-to-back chapters, and then North Korea as more of a singular narrative. Throughout this, Cumings does a great job at dragging up earlier points he made and reminding readers how the modern history was connected to the old. In particular, he points to how North Korean politics share a lot with late-Joseon scholar dynastic politics, but mixed in with an identity formed in resistance to the Japanese and a hatred of collaborators. Meanwhile, South Korea never fully shed the Japanese occupation and collaborators continued to exist in important roles in the state, and this tension played a major role in the peninsular conflict.

Throughout, Cumings also shows his personal connection to Korea. He has visited both North and South Koreans, the latter multiple times, and includes personal anecdotes at times to illustrate points. While I wouldn’t say every single one of these is amazing, they do help in places to ground the narrative to the personal and remind the reader that the author speaks Korean, has spent time in the country, and has connected with its scholars and people. Having a historian be able to read (and ideally speak) the language of the country they are studying sometimes feels like a minimum standard, but when it comes to histories of countries with difficult languages for English speakers to learn it is not always as common as we’d like.

Overall, I was really impressed with Korea’s Place in the Sun and would heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about Korea. Cumings frequently notes that it is a country that many Americans know about, but that only a tiny fraction can say they actually know. This is illustrated most clearly in his final chapter on the Korean diaspora, and I think it speaks to this books goal as a possible means to help people know Korea a little better.

This review originally appeared on my website. You can find more reviews at https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blo... ...more

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This is Free Trader Beowulf by Shannon Appelcline

This is Free Trader Beowulf: a System History of Traveller
by Shannon Appelcline (Goodreads Author)

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I’ve never played Traveller, which makes it a little weird that I decided to read a pretty lengthy history of the game. However, I have an ongoing fascination with the history of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and I want to expand from my knowle I’ve never played Traveller, which makes it a little weird that I decided to read a pretty lengthy history of the game. However, I have an ongoing fascination with the history of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and I want to expand from my knowledge from the histories of Dungeons and Dragons to other roleplaying systems. I had heard good things about This is Free Trader Beowulf, and Shannon Appelcline has an impressive reputation within the field of historians of TTRPGs, so I decided to grab a copy even if I have no personal relationship with the system (outside of an ongoing joke from university friends about how you can die in character creation, I can’t claim we were very original). Overall, I enjoyed This is Free Trader Beowulf, but I also found my lack of connection to the system held back my enjoyment and I often wished it was a slightly different book than it is. I can’t strictly criticize it for that difference – the book is what it’s author wants it to be – but I do want to explore that some here in case you, dear reader, are like me (or, if not, that you at least can learn if this book is for you).

This is Free Trader Beowulf takes an era-by-era approach to the history of Traveller – starting with its earliest origins and following a mostly chronological progression of the game from the 1970s to the current day. Traveller has had a bumpy history, moving between multiple writers and publishers with some spin offs (e.g. GURPS Traveller), and as a relative novice I had never really understood the different versions and eras. This is Free Trader Beowulf held my hand and walked me through this confusion and helped to explain who was behind what part of Traveller and why it bounced around – for example, explaining to me what the hell MegaTraveller was. In this way, the book does what it says on the cover: I have a much clearer idea of the development of Traveller over the decades. I do wish it spent a little more time on the creation – as a huge fan of Playing at the World I would read whole books about how the ideas for TTRPGs came to be – but again I can only complain so much about wanting a book to be different from what it is.

My favorite sections were probably the chapters that were devoted to the robust fan culture that rose up around Traveller, and how those fans often transitioned to writers of the game they loved. These chapters help to expand the book’s scope beyond the strict confines of Traveller’s publishers and into the people who played it. I do think it still focuses a little too much on the publications and the management of the fan clubs. I would love to learn more about what these people actually said about the game (the discourse around it, if you will). Still, it was really interesting to see how closely intertwined Traveller’s fans were with the game’s production, and the difference that GDW’s approach to its fans made when compared to how hostile TSR often was to D&D’s fans (and the idea that those fans might be writing and publishing content for the game).

If I have a mild criticism of This is Free Trader Beowulf, it is that it leans heavily into lists of books that were published for Traveller in its various eras (along with boxes outlining releases that never came to be). This is valuable information to have, and represents a useful historical archive, but this is where my lack of personal connection to Traveller felt like it held back my enjoyment of the book. Early on I was interested to see how Traveller expanded, but as the book progressed, I cared less and less about what splat books came out for a certain era or version of Traveller. I would much rather have learned more about the people who wrote the books and the audience who read them – there isn’t none of that in the book, but I would have liked more.

Now, this is a personal complaint rather than a failing of the text. From the checklists of books present at the end of each chapter, I can infer that this listing of books is part of the purpose of This is Free Trader Beowulf and probably there are people who want that, and I’m happy for them. But, if you are like me, maybe this book won’t click with you as well because of this.

I also have some gripes with the book as a physical product. First of all, it’s laid out as a sort of coffee table book, where it’s much wider than it is tall. I find this very awkward to hold and read, and I do not like it. Also, it has not been through a thorough enough copy edit/proofread by the publisher. No fault of this lies with the author, it’s just part of the writing process, but it’s the publisher’s job to correct them and there are a few glaring proofreading errors in the text and I hate to see it in any book, and especially in a book that costs as much as this does. These aren’t world ending problems, but they were frustrating.

The formatting/proofreading errors are especially disappointing because the rest of the book is gorgeous. Since it is published by Mongoose Publishing (the current publisher of Traveller) it includes lots of official Traveller art and other materials to look at. Including the visuals of Traveller helps to show how those aesthetics were developed over the game’s history, and those aesthetics are such a big part of Traveller’s identity. I love the splash pages of art and the general layout of text and images. With the wide format it meanders a bit into coffee table book range, and maybe if I had treated more like that I wouldn’t have minded the format thing as much. But, if you love classic Traveller art, or are just curious what a Traveller module from 1982 looked like, this book has you covered.

Overall, I enjoyed This is Free Trade Beowulf, and I would generally recommend it to fans of Traveller (but maybe they are the group who least need my recommendation). I know a lot more about the history of GDW and the legacy of Traveller as a venerable TTRPG, which is what I wanted out of reading this book. However, I did grow a little tired of the lists of books as I was reading it, so the earlier sections held my attention better than the end. I will confess, I actually stopped reading the sections on books that were never finished for each era, because at about the halfway point I no longer cared. But caveats aside, look, it was interesting and I’m glad I read it.

This review originally appeared on my website at: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blo... ...more

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Playtesting Best Practices by Chris Backe

Playtesting Best Practices: Real World and Online (CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design)
by Chris Backe (Goodreads Author)

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The Underground Village
by Kang Kyeong-ae

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Powerful writing, incredibly bleak. Glad I read it, I dont intend to do so a second time.

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