A fresh way to envision the Medieval era.
Overhauling the notion of the Medieval Ages as a time of zealotry and ignorance and examining the nuts and bolts of crusading.
By concentrating on the “prosaic methods” of crusading rather than on the drama of the campaigns, as historians have traditionally done, Crusades expert Tyerman (History/Univ. of Oxford; The Debate on the Crusades 1099-2010, 2011, etc.) manages to demythologize the process. The outcomes of the Crusades—usually not good, and the author lays out the other numerous smaller ones in addition to the five big ones, from 1096 to the 1290s—do not concern Tyerman as much as the details of planning: recruitment, finance, logistics, supplies, etc. While the author concedes that the recruitment for these massive undertakings required the creation of a religious justification—e.g., “God wills it,” and warriors were assured of a spiritual as well as material reward—the effective propaganda by religious leaders instilled in volunteers a sense of military urgency, even revenge. The missions served as holy wars to push back the threat to the order of Christendom in the Mediterranean especially. The Crusades also tightly involved the culture of the ruling aristocratic elite, expressed through the concept of chivalry, and required persuasion and propaganda by itinerant preachers at local assemblies and open-air sermons to sign up the necessary volunteers. Tyerman uses the examples of two such 12th-century preachers—Henry of Marcy and Gerald of Wales—to illustrate these methods. Much of Tyerman’s work is a fascinating but dense catalog of logistics, including who actually went on crusade (the aristocrats and their retinue, as well as women), where the money came from, and what kind of massive supplies were needed, as delineated so beautifully in the Bayeux Tapestry. The narrative may leave lay readers not familiar with the specific Crusades bewildered, but overall, Tyerman provides a compelling, vivid sense of a lively, pragmatic, driven, and highly organized society.
A fresh way to envision the Medieval era.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-524-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
