In 146 BC, the armies of the Roman Republic destroyed Carthage and Corinth, two of the most spectacular cities of the ancient Mediterranean world. It was a display of ruthlessness so terrible that it shocked contemporaries, leaving behind deep scars and palpable historical traumas. Yet these twin destructions were not so extraordinary in the long annals of Roman warfare. In Spare No One, Gabriel Baker convincingly shows that mass violence was vital to Roman military operations. Indeed, in virtually every war they fought during the third and second centuries BC, the Roman legions killed and enslaved populations, executed prisoners, and put cities to the torch. This powerful book reveals that these violent acts were not normally the handiwork of frenzied soldiers run amok, nor were they spontaneous outbursts of uncontrolled savagery. On the contrary—and more troublingly—Roman commanders deliberately used these brutal strategies to achieve their most critical military objectives and political goals. Bringing long-overdue attention to this little-known aspect of Roman history, Baker paints a fuller, albeit darker, picture of Roman warfare. He ultimately demonstrates that the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have deep historical precedents. Casting a fresh light on the strategic use of total war in the ancient world, he reminds us that terror and mass violence could be the rational policies of men and states long before the modern age.

Talking fridges, human clone farms, flying shopping malls – we must be in the Michael Marshall Smith zone. A world all too close to our own...

Poetry. BARNBURNER by Erin Hoover is the winner of the 2017 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. Kathryn Nuernberger, contest judge, had this to say about it: "The epigraph to BARNBURNER is a call to burn it all down: 'According to an old story, there was once a Dutchman who was so bothered by the rats in his barn that he burned down the barn to get rid of them. Thus a barn burner became one who destroyed all in order to get rid of a nuisance.' There is honesty in this epigraph, raw and brutal, like the narrative voices in Erin Hoover's poems. But there's an irony at play here, an irony perhaps borrowing a bit from the ironies of Frost's 'Mending Wall': these poems don't burn down the cruelties of a homogeneous, racist patriarchy. Instead, they make a muse of it. A muse that can be objectified, stripped bare, and put on a pedestal for all to scorn. Hoover fridges that muse so that one speaker of a heroine after another is vaulted by the shock of such violence into a journey of personal discovery. There are mean-spirited, ruthless characters in these poems and, in a kind of reverse Bechdel test, Hoover wipes away their inner lives and never lets them talk to each other about anything except those they have hurt."

In the early 20th century the US "International Code of Signals" was a very progressive way for vessels to communicate important messages regarding matters of safety and navigation. The edition of 1907 contained three sections: the first part depicts urgent and important signals and all the tables of money, weights, barometric heights, etc., together with a geographical list and a table of phrases formed with the auxiliary verbs. The second part is an index. It consists of a general vocabulary and a geographical index. The third part gives lists of the United States storm-warning, life-saving, time-signal, and wireless telegraph stations, and of Lloyd's signal stations of the world. It also contains semaphore and distant signal codes and the United States Army and Navy and Morse Wigwag Codes. Reprint of the original edition.

Instructions regarding ordnance aboard U.S. Navy vessels.