A history of the 1291 siege of Acre that brings the convoluted give-and-take between Muslim and Christian entities to vivid life and relevance.
Beginning in the 12th century, Acre helped hold together the “Frankish” principalities along the Mediterranean shore of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, aka the Outremer, which was established during the First Crusade (1096-1099) in the wake of Muslim onslaught. An ancient strategic site, writes Crowley (Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, 2015, etc.), Acre first “fell to Islam in 636.” In 1104, it was taken by Baldwin of Boulogne, the “first crusader King of Jerusalem,” and became the “chief landing place for pilgrims and the armies to protect them.” The Muslims regained the city in 1187. However, in a 683-day battering siege of the city’s ramparts (1189-1191), the Christians, led by Richard I “Lionheart” of England and others, defeated the Muslims, who were led by Saladin, prince of the Ayyubid dynasty. It was a “titanic” battle that came down to Acre’s so-called Accursed Tower, located in the most fortified area. Yet instead of extending mercy to the inhabitants, as Saladin had done to the Christians, Richard had approximately 3,000 Muslim defenders beheaded. This development set the “bitter legacy” for the final retaking of Acre from the Christians by the Muslims exactly 100 years later. Crowley adeptly builds the detail and suspense that led up to this extraordinary last pitched battle, which involved the might of the ascendant Mamluks, or the Turkish slaves who would become sultans, and their incomparable skills and resources, such as the awesome trebuchet. Led by the fearless Sultan Khalil, the Mamluks took the city by surprise in several weeks, with people attempting in vain to flee by ship. As the author writes in this exciting, sleek narrative, “the looting was feverish and spectacular.” At the end of the book, the author also provides a useful section on “the evidence for the fall of Acre.”
A bracing work by a masterly historian whose great knowledge portrays the “dramatic symbolic significance” of this landmark event.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5416-9734-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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