Readable history for specialists and general audiences alike.
A British historian explores the lives of the women who ruled Christian-captured Jerusalem, circa 1100.
Though chroniclers of the First Crusade left a “rich trove” of narrative sources for modern historians, most of these writers were also misogynist male clerics who minimized the achievements of many powerful women. To balance the historical record, Pangonis, who specializes in the medieval world of the Mediterranean and Middle East, considers the roles and deeds of the unsung queens of Jerusalem who ruled between 1099 and 1187. Crowned in 1118, Morphia was “the first woman to preside as queen over the Kingdom of Jerusalem for any length of time.” Like the royal female consorts who preceded her, her power to rule came from her husband, Baldwin II. But the four daughters she bore him each became rulers at different times of the four states of Outremer, the lands crusaders wrested from the Muslims. Pangonis pays particular attention to Morphia’s first-born daughter, Melisende, whom Baldwin groomed to rule Jerusalem. Like princesses who stood to inherit kingdoms in Europe, though, she could not be named sole inheritor and was forced to marry according to the wishes of her father and his nobles. That did not stop her from later refusing to step down in favor of the son who forcibly deposed her. Her willfulness would be recalled in the sometimes-scandalous actions taken by her sisters, female cousins, and, later, her granddaughter, Sibylla, the last queen of Jerusalem. Married to a “suitable” match as a teenager and then quickly widowed, Sibylla rebelled against royal expectations and married the landless son of a French lord. A complex historical narrative that celebrates female agency and a tale of family intrigue spanning generations, this book sheds light on the silenced women of a fascinating medieval bloodline.
Readable history for specialists and general audiences alike.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-924-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
A top-notch political biography.
A cradle-to-today portrait of a master politician who “shattered the ‘marble ceiling’ and blazed a new trail for women.”
Born in 1940 into an avidly political family, Nancy D'Alesandro absorbed a great deal about electoral politics from her father—a five-term Congressman and, later, three-term mayor of Baltimore—and from her mother, who supported her husband's campaigning in addition to raising seven children (tragically, one died at age 3). TIME national political correspondent and CNN political analyst Ball uses numerous memorable anecdotes to portray Pelosi's childhood, adolescence, early married life, and mothering of five children. Establishing a family base in San Francisco because of her husband's career in finance, Pelosi had no initial plans to enter politics. Ball explains clearly how that opinion evolved, with Pelosi entering the U.S. House of Representatives in 1987. In large portions of the narrative, the author focuses on Pelosi’s remarkable ability to overcome myriad stereotypes and outright misogyny to achieve ever more powerful positions in the House. Ball delves into Pelosi's leadership on a variety of controversial issues—e.g., the Iraq War (“to Pelosi and, by that point, most Americans, it seemed devastatingly obvious that the war had been a tragic misadventure”) and the 2008 financial meltdown—while also offering intriguing information about her professional relationships with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and dozens of other recognizable names. It is no surprise that Pelosi is a relentless workaholic, and Ball provides plenty of instructive examples. Other personal details—“she never drank alcohol, rarely had caffeine that wasn’t from her beloved dark chocolate and didn’t need more than a few hours’ sleep per night”—add human touches to a subject who is intensely private and never “indulges in public introspection.” Ultimately, this is a portrait of a persistent, fearless leader undaunted in the face of relentless opposition. Ball obviously admires Pelosi, but this is not a hagiography.
A top-notch political biography. (photo insert)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-25286-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Certain to be controversial, but all the more important for that.
The final book from the longtime activist anthropologist.
In a lively display of up-to-date anthropology, Graeber (1961-2020) offers a behind-the-scenes view of how a skilled researcher extracts knowledge from the slimmest evidence about a long-ago multiethnic society composed of pirates and settled members of existing communities. In this posthumous book, the author turns to 17th- and 18th-century Madagascar and examines hard-to-credit sources to tease out some plausible facts about the creation and early life of a distinctive Indian Ocean society, some of whose Malagasy descendants (“the Zana-Malata”) are alive today. Exhibiting his characteristic politically tinged sympathies, Graeber describes the pirates who plied the seas and settled on Madagascar as an ethno-racially integrated proletariat “spearheading the development of new forms of democratic governance.” He also argues that many of the pirates and others displayed European Enlightenment ideas even though they inhabited “a very unlikely home for Enlightenment political experiments.” Malagasies were “Madagascar’s most stubbornly egalitarian peoples,” and, as the author shows, women played significant roles in the society, which reflected Jewish, Muslin, Ismaili, and Gnostic origins as well as native Malagasy and Christian ones. All of this information gives Graeber the chance to wonder, in his most provocative conjecture, whether Enlightenment ideals might have emerged as much beyond Western lands as within them. His argument that pirates, women traders, and community leaders in early 18th-century Madagascar were “global political actors in the fullest sense of the term” is overstated, but even with such excesses taken into account, the text is a tour de force of anthropological scholarship and an important addition to Malagasy history. It’s also a work written with a pleasingly light touch. The principal audience will be anthropologists, but those who love pirate lore or who seek evidence that mixed populations were long capable of establishing proto-democratic societies will also find enlightenment in these pages.
Certain to be controversial, but all the more important for that.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-61019-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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