In this brisk account of the Third Crusade (1189—1192), Regan, author of numerous popular military histories, shines a soft, flattering light on the leaders of the two opposing forces in the greatest of all oxymorons: holy war. Early chapters focus first on the boyhood and rise to power of King Richard I (the Lionheart), then on the analogous biographical aspects of Saladin, the Muslim leader. (Though joined in history, the two principals never met.) Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 precipitated the Third Crusade, details of which—preparations, alliances, journeys, strategies, battles—comprise most of the book. A patent admirer of military strategy, technology, and leadership (both Saladin and Richard occupy prominent spots in Regan’s pantheon), of the accomplishments of individual warriors, Regan can manage only a perfunctory condemnation of Richard’s murder of 3,000 Muslim captives after the siege of Acre; almost droll are his descriptions of Richard collecting enemy heads. Nonetheless, Regan’s considerable narrative gifts guide readers gracefully across unfamiliar and unforgiving terrain in company with exotic 12th-century people whose loyalties to one another are startlingly evanescent and whose harsh pieties permit wholesale human slaughter in the names of Jesus and Mohammed. Piquant anecdotes frequently enliven the prose (Frederick Barbarossa drowned in a foot of water on his way to the Holy Land; Richard nearly lost his life when he stole a peasant’s falcon), but general readers will need to scurry to their dictionaries—big ones!—to look up much of the archaic martial terminology (e.g., mangonel, fascine, haqueton, gambeson, and trebuchet). And some might wonder why Regan is so determined to demonstrate that Richard Lionheart was not a homosexual (he raises the issue in three separate places), or why he comments a couple of times on the quality of prostitutes in the Christian encampment. A paean to Richard and Saladin and desert warfare—the clashes of cultures resound as loudly as those of the weapons. (8 pages photos, not seen; 5 maps)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8027-1354-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
