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
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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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
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