In this brisk account of the Third Crusade (1189—1192), Regan, author of numerous popular military histories, shines a soft, flattering light on the leaders of the two opposing forces in the greatest of all oxymorons: holy war. Early chapters focus first on the boyhood and rise to power of King Richard I (the Lionheart), then on the analogous biographical aspects of Saladin, the Muslim leader. (Though joined in history, the two principals never met.) Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 precipitated the Third Crusade, details of which—preparations, alliances, journeys, strategies, battles—comprise most of the book. A patent admirer of military strategy, technology, and leadership (both Saladin and Richard occupy prominent spots in Regan’s pantheon), of the accomplishments of individual warriors, Regan can manage only a perfunctory condemnation of Richard’s murder of 3,000 Muslim captives after the siege of Acre; almost droll are his descriptions of Richard collecting enemy heads. Nonetheless, Regan’s considerable narrative gifts guide readers gracefully across unfamiliar and unforgiving terrain in company with exotic 12th-century people whose loyalties to one another are startlingly evanescent and whose harsh pieties permit wholesale human slaughter in the names of Jesus and Mohammed. Piquant anecdotes frequently enliven the prose (Frederick Barbarossa drowned in a foot of water on his way to the Holy Land; Richard nearly lost his life when he stole a peasant’s falcon), but general readers will need to scurry to their dictionaries—big ones!—to look up much of the archaic martial terminology (e.g., mangonel, fascine, haqueton, gambeson, and trebuchet). And some might wonder why Regan is so determined to demonstrate that Richard Lionheart was not a homosexual (he raises the issue in three separate places), or why he comments a couple of times on the quality of prostitutes in the Christian encampment. A paean to Richard and Saladin and desert warfare—the clashes of cultures resound as loudly as those of the weapons. (8 pages photos, not seen; 5 maps)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8027-1354-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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