by Malcolm Lambert ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016
An all-encompassing introduction to the Christian-Islamic struggle for the armchair history buff.
A Medieval history expert introduces readers to the epic struggle for the Near East, spanning the dawn of Islam to the rise of the Ottoman Empire and beyond.
In a work that can be somewhat overwhelming in its breadth of history and geography, Lambert (Christians and Pagans: The Conversion of Britain from Alban to Bede, 2010, etc.) provides a full introduction to the politics, warfare, and intrigue that marked Christian-Islamic history for many centuries—and which still colors it today. Readers will find many familiar names within these pages—Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Suleiman, among several others—as well as a host of little-known warriors, potentates, divines, and, notably, women who helped create the history of the era. In the process of telling this story, Lambert hopes to dispel myths on both sides of history. Realizing that both “crusade” and “jihad” have been politicized in modern parlance, he attempts to humanize these concepts by sharing the real lives behind these broad terms. He presents leaders and warriors of all stripes, from those motivated by faith and a desire to do right to those motivated by a hunger for power, profit, or revenge. The author also makes it clear that discerning “good” versus “bad” actors throughout these centuries is almost impossible. Readers will learn a great deal about how Medieval Christian and Islamic warfare and power-shifting set up the violence we see even today, from lingering anger over the Crusades to the Sunni-Shiite split. If there is any truly overriding theme, it is the pervasiveness of violence throughout this period. Some readers may become numb after several chapters detailing how captives were executed, hostages murdered, rulers assassinated, and one political opponent after another brutally tortured—all in the name of God or Allah.
An all-encompassing introduction to the Christian-Islamic struggle for the armchair history buff.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-224-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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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