Bloody medieval geopolitics in the service of God.
An Islamic sect and a Christian military order who shared a willingness to die.
Tibble, author of The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land, sets his scene in the Middle East in 1100, a disturbed time for many Islamic regimes when, out of the blue, the Crusaders appeared. After a bloody decade, four Christian “Crusader states” emerged that carried on but shrank over the next two centuries. Tibble reminds readers that neither of the two religions was monolithic and that Islam remains divided primarily into Shia and Sunni denominations. The assassins arose in Shiite Persia shortly before Crusaders arrived. Persia had recently been conquered by Sunni Turks, so there was no shortage of unhappy believers, and a charismatic leader founded a Shiite sect convinced that they were God’s chosen people. A fringe movement, it lacked numbers but developed an effective tactic. Believing that eternal rewards awaited those who eliminated the enemies of God, members regularly murdered those who stood in their way. This made a spectacular impression, and they enjoyed modest success, surviving until the Mongol invasion two centuries later. Drawing a parallel, the author introduces a concurrent Christian military order, the Knights Templar. Having conquered the Holy Land, most Crusaders returned home. When those who remained had difficulty fending off attacks from surrounding Islamic states, a few pious knights formed a brotherhood dedicated to protecting pilgrims. Attracting followers and money from Europe, the Knights Templar grew from a military order willing to die serving Christ into a wealthy organization whose influence rivaled that of European monarchs. Two centuries later, when the tide had turned against the Crusaders, Philip IV of France, always short of money, confiscated its wealth and executed most of its leaders. With no deep lessons to deliver, Tibble’s final chapter discusses the bestselling sci-fi fantasy video game Assassin’s Creed, which is not historically accurate but ingenious.
Bloody medieval geopolitics in the service of God.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780300282122
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
He came home eventually, to do the “Survivor Shuffle” and miss Vietnam acutely, and he writes with a fierce, tight...
“Vietnam, man. Bomb ’em and feed ’em, bomb ’em and feed ’em”—a chopper pilot summarized the war strategy for Herr.
And with Herr’s belated volume of unfiled dispatches from the front, the awareness grows that this war—like no other since WWI—continues to produce a rich lode of literature, part litany, part exorcism, part macabre nostalgia. Like his buddies Scan Flynn and Dana Stone—later MIA in Cambodia—Herr was a correspondent with a license to see more than just a single mud hole. Using the “Airmobility” of the helicopters, he hopscotched the country from Hue to Danang to the DMZ to Saigon (“the subtle city war inside the war” where corruption stank like musk oil). He was at Hue during the battle that reduced the old Imperial capital to rubble, at Khe Sanh when the grunts’ expectations of another Alamo were running high. Between mortar shells and body bags he reflected on the mysterious smiles of the blank-eyed soldiers, smiles that said “I’ll tell you why I’m smiling, but it will make you crazy.” And Herr, who is full of twisted, hidden ironies, is all wrapped up in the craziness of the war, enthralled by the limitless “variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered,” and by the awful “cheer-crazed” language of the official communiques which always reported spirits high, weather fine. He knew, and his buddies knew, that this kind of reportage was “psychotic vaudeville”—though not for a moment would he deny the harsh glamour of being a working war correspondent.
He came home eventually, to do the “Survivor Shuffle” and miss Vietnam acutely, and he writes with a fierce, tight insistence that never lets go.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1977
ISBN: 0679735259
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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