A bracing work by a masterly historian whose great knowledge portrays the “dramatic symbolic significance” of this landmark...
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 Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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