A vivid narrative that effectively delineates the era’s courtly spirit and “nightmarish barbarity.”
Elegant biography of a little-known Frankish crusader who is still a thorn in the sides of Islamists.
South Africa–born, London-based journalist Lee uses the life of Reynald de Chatillon as a way to tell the story of the Second Crusade (1145-1149), a mostly disastrous affair for the Christians that paved the way for Saladin’s subsequent sack of Jerusalem in 1187. Lee portrays Reynald—who was from Burgundy and responded as a young knight-errant to Abbot Bernard de Clairvaux’s call to reclaim the city of Edessa—as the chivalric ideal. A younger son, Reynald had little recourse to economic betterment other than joining the military and hoping to secure riches and fame from the militant, expansionist Christian army spurred by the pope to reclaim the Levant from the Muslims. With his courtly manners and keen sense of potential glory, Reynald was nonetheless trained as a merciless killer, and he was enlisted to aid the defense of the crusader state of Antioch, where he caught the eye and sympathy of the widowed princess Constance, whom he married. Now as a prince of Antioch, Reynald had to continually defend the principality from Muslim raids, but he also invaded and sacked the Christian island of Cyprus “in a piratical fashion,” gaining him the opprobrium of the Byzantium emperor and Muslims alike. Throughout, Lee graphically portrays the gory violence that dominated the era. Captured by the Turks after the battle of Marash in 1161, Reynald spent the next 15 years imprisoned in Aleppo, under the jurisdiction of Turkish leader Nur al-Din. During the last 10 years of his life, Reynald would chastise his nemesis Saladin from the Arabian Peninsula to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1187, he was captured in the Battle of Hattin and executed after refusing to renounce his faith.
A vivid narrative that effectively delineates the era’s courtly spirit and “nightmarish barbarity.”Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60969-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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 2024 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.
bookshelf
