Knights in Shining Armor
My second title for the year, finished while I was down in Greensburg at the residency, is Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World: AD 500 - AD 1500 : Equipment, Combat Skills, And Tactics, by Matthew Bennett, Jim Bradbury, Kelly DeVries, Iain Dickie, & Phyllis Jestice. This book was recommended by Russ Howe, in a lecture on the Middle Ages which I attended, and I can now recommend it to others.
First, the quibbles. The book is almost entirely focused on battle tactics and the military history of the period. The title and subtitle focus on "techniques", which suggests personal combat techniques, and that is largely absent. Equipment is discussed, but not in real detail. Also, the chapters (The Role of Infantry; Mounted Warfare; Command and Control; Siege Techniques; Naval Warfare) are written by different hands, and there were some minor instances of repetition as a result.
I'll also admit that I didn't learn a great deal from most of the book, but this is primarily because I'm well read in the field, not because the book is lacking. It is, indeed, a rather fine, broad-sweeping report on the era; and it includes a discussion of specific exemplar battles and sieges that reveal how the armies actually did on the rare occasions that they fought pitched battles. The Hussite war wagons was not something I knew about, and there were some interesting weapons in the eastern armies with which I'm not familiar, and I found those parts very useful. There's good information on the varying role of cavalry, which is often ignored in other works, despite the focus on mounted knights by most works on the period.
CBsIP: student manuscripts
The Chess Garden, Brooks Hansen
Peter the Great, Robert K. Massie
Dancing Naked, William Tenn
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Ralph D. Sawyer