by Jeffrey Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2017
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
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by Jeffrey Lee
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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