A remarkably intimate and engagingly detailed account of pre-modern violence and obsession—with the principal figures...
An exacting, compulsively readable narrative of the Third Crusade’s (1187–92) protracted battle of wills between Richard I and Saladin.
Pulitzer winner Reston (The Last Apocalypse, 1998, etc.) relies on diverse sources in recreating this era of bloodshed and religion, noting that, of five major crusades, “Only the First Crusade was ‘successful’ in the sense that it managed to capture Jerusalem.” He conveys his fascination with the regal figures who drove the Third and “most interesting” Crusade, portraying Richard the Lionhearted as a sadist and homosexual who nonetheless was a fierce strategist and commander. In addressing the human sides of the crusades, Reston provides a good look at both the complex chivalric structures that governed the conflicts and the deep brutality that they concealed (crusader knights, for example, were expected to provide not just financial support but peasant manpower as well). The crusaders’ ostentatious rhetoric masked an astonishingly bloodthirsty enterprise, which the Arabic defenders quickly matched. Richard had 2,700 Muslim prisoners slaughtered following the siege of Acre in 1191, for example—and this atrocity led Saladin to “permit his soldiers . . . to hack their prisoners to pieces.” Like a medieval Viet Cong, Saladin drew the crusader armies into a protracted war of attrition, counting on the region’s natural hazards (especially the lack of water) to decimate them, and dismantling their ancient cities ahead of Richard’s advance. Repeated (and duplicitous) peace negotiations amounted to nothing, and the Third Crusade ended ignominiously short of Jerusalem, following the Pyrrhic capture of Jaffa at a total estimated cost of 300,000 Crusader lives.
A remarkably intimate and engagingly detailed account of pre-modern violence and obsession—with the principal figures robustly portrayed.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49561-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
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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