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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
