So this will probably be the oddest source suggestion, but I love it so much I need to mention it: the Barnes and Noble coffee table book 100 Great Archaeological Discoveries. If you have seen a coffee table book you know the format, large glossy photos and page long descriptions, but the articles are all by experts in the field, and the sites chosen lean more towards those famous in the archaeological community than in popular culture. So while Pompeii and the Pyramids get mention, most of the articles are on places like Pyzyryk, Lapita ceramics, and paleolithic Tasmania. There are definitely a few questionable choices--east, south, and southeast Asia get the short shrift, while three articles on Bronze Age Greece is probably overdoing it--but that is quibbling.

This is usually reserved for scholarly works, and this is certainly not that, but I thought it would be fun to recommend a work for someone who is interested in archaeology but doesn't want to trawl through pages and pages on post-processualism and calibrated C-14 dating.

I've been doing some research into reception of clerical demands and expectations among the chivalric class and now face a rather daunting task of trawling through a swathe of ecclesiastical literature and sermons looking for possibly non-existent connections. This is a process and a source-base I am relatively unfamiliar with and would love to read examples from any period (or theoretical sermons) which will enable me to do this properly. Of course, the more relevant to my topic the better but I'm scrambling around to build my own approach so any detailed input would be of great use.

So lately I've noticed a few people mentioning that "blitzkrieg" (as we in the west know it) didn't exist. So I've decided to look into that idea. I picked up the "blitzkrieg myth" by John Mosier which appears to be the text that everyone making these assertions likes to cite. Frankly if it's anything like Mosier's other books I doubt I'll be convinced. Has anyone read this book and/or encountered this idea? Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.

I had a review of Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety published in Physics Today, and I wrote up a longer, more analytically sensitive review for my blog yesterday. The long and short of it is that Schlosser, a journalist, has written a great work of history. If you're someone who works in, or is interested in, nuclear history and Cold War history, the book is a must-read.

Can anyone recommend particularly good reading on Emperor Hadrian? I had a really interesting short talk on his travels in Egypt at the British Museum a couple of weeks ago and it made me want to find out more!

I keep getting distracted by spring chores and other things, but I picked up and am trying to get into Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz' Rereading Sex, a history of 19th century legal battles between pornographers, sexual reformers, and censors, as research for that history of censorship theories that I keep not working on, Secret History and Forbidden Lore.

Thanks to the sweet reading list that /u/DonaldFDraper created I purchased The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G. Chandler. And while the book was rather expensive, its been a great read.

Finally found some time to read through Christopher Beckwith's Empires of the Silk Road. It does a great job of resituating the peoples of Central Asia not as the path between Europe and China, but rather as a force of culture themselves.