Rating: 
Summary: Great
Review: This is a great, juicy page turner of a history. There's a good balance between the epic scale of the characters and the actual events that they took part in. Reston covers everything from battles to backstage politcal manuevering to messy romances to sherbert delivery. It's a delicious read.
Rating: 
Summary: TERRIBLY BORING
Review: This book should be a high school textbook it is so boring. It is a shame that with such an intersting tpic they can murder it so much. They bog you down with names and dates and places and it has no flow or rhythm whatsoever. Save yourself the mind wandering and find another book.
Rating:
Summary: A balanced telling of history
Review: Reston tells the history behind the Third Crusade from both sides of the conflict, Muslim and Christian. The balanced of this book is important to anyone interested in learning more about the history of the Middle East and the view of the West by Muslims.The Crusades are still viewed as recent history by a majority of residents of the Middle East. It is important to understand this as we deal with the Middle East more and more. Saladin is still revered by many in the Middle East and his role in the third crusades is explored here. Reston weaves the early history of the First and Second Crusades quickly together to give the reader a background against which the Third Crusades is fought. He then briefly gives biographies of both Saladin and Richard so the reader can compare these two great historical figures. Reston next outlines the ground work for the Third crusade. It begins with horrible behavior by a "Christian" leader against relatives of Saladin. Reston does not shy away from the unpleasantness of either sides actions throughout the book. Both Christians and Muslims are shown to have done deplorable acts. The history of the Third Crusade is next detailed by Reston. This history shows how both Saladin and Richard were in essence pushed by their peers to continue the conflict even while these same peers abandoned their support. The Third crusades were also marked by the hubris of Richard and the willingness of Saladin to try to reach a peaceful compromise. Reston then wraps up the crusade and completes the biographies of both Saladin and Richard. Overall the book tells a very interesting story and gives a balanced view of both sides of the conflict.
Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps a book for our time
Review: As we encounter new reasons to invade the middle east, perhaps it is wise to look at the previous history of the period. The crusades were not a battle between good and evil. If anything, the invading armies of Europe were far more barabaric than those they encountered. Reston has written a fair and balanced version of the struggle between Saladin and Richard the Lion Heart. Saddam considered himself to be a later day Saladin and much of the agony of the middle east stems from the crusades. A vital book to udnerstand a vital period of history with impacts still touching us today.
Rating: 
Summary: This is not a historical book.
Review: As a history major that has studied both Medieval Europe and the Crusades, I think this book is poorly researched. The author relays unproven gossip as fact(There is no historical evidence Richard was a homosexual. The author seems to have taken his intepretation of Richard from "The Lion in Winter"). He also puts words and thoughts into the minds of people with no basis for them ever saying anything like it. It is an interpretation of Saladin and Richard as he sees them in the context of literary characters. If you are a student looking to write about them and need a source, avoid this book.
Rating:
Summary: A historical tour de force
Review: "The Warriors of God" examines the Third Crusade of the late 12th century with a focus on the remarkable opposing leaders: the Sultan Saladin and Richard I of England (the Lionheart). The Crusades are a confusing epoch since they spanned several hundred years and included a shifting cast of characters with equally shifting motives. With the exception of the First Crusade that established the Frankish Kingdom in the Middle East, the Third Crusade was the event of singular importance whose ramifications ripple to the present. A strong Frankish Kingdom would have altered the balance of power in the Middle East in unforeseeable ways. For instance, the Ottoman Turks may not have been able to topple the Byzantine Empire had another powerful Christian kingdom existed nearby.
Reston portrays the events surrounding the Crusade with remarkable clarity. Saladin (who was Kurdish) emerges as a skillful politician and military leader who unites a fragmented group of Islamic principalities into a formidable empire that wrenches Jerusalem and much of the territory won in the First Crusade from the Christians. Richard the Lionheart then bursts on the scene as the most formidable individual warrior and military leader that Saladin and his Moslem force face. Reston brings these events to life using narratives from both Christian and Islamic sources. A remarkable respect between Saladin and Richard evolves as the leaders communicate by emissaries that even include the Sultan's brother. Chivalry clearly exists despite the overall brutality of the conflict. Reston describes how Saladin's shaken emirs at one point suggest contracting with the dreaded Assassins to have Richard killed. Saladin vetoed the suggestion as being dishonorable, despite the fact that Richard had single-handedly driven the Crusaders to the hills overlooking Jerusalem and was poised to shatter Saladin's empire. Few historical treatises are as engaging as this fine book.
Rating:
Summary: Footnotes? Have you ever heard of bootstraps??
Review: I find the criticisms of this book based upon purported bias and/or lack of footnoting amusing. First, on bias, all Westerners should acknowledge that we've been programmed to view virtually all Arabs and Muslims as terrorists, or at least "terror-symps" (Remember "commie-symps"?). I did not find bias on Reston's part. Instead, his view merely echos the open-minded view of other, arguably more serious historians, such as Lord Kinross, whose "The Ottoman Centuries" chronicles the rise in the mid 15th C. and the collapse in the early 20th C. of a fabulous civilization. Indeed, the outstanding (perhaps only because of its contrast to current Western stereotypes) feature of the Ottoman civilization was its tolerance, yes, my friends, tolerance, for Jews, Christians and "infidels" of all stripes and spots. Footnotes? Has it ever occurred to these folks to do some independent reading? I claim no scholarship whatsoever on the Crusades, but I was surprised and curious enough about the scale of the reported slaughter in Jerusalem during the first Crusade to read the chapter on the topic in a 1966 translation of Zoe Oldenbourg's "The Crusade". (Yes, she is French, but this was long before "Freedom Fries" became a call to politi-culinary conquest.) Under the "fair use" doctrine, I offer the following, all from Chapter III, pp. 137-142 of the English translation by Anne Carter for Pantheon Books, and under the sub-title "The Great Massacre": "The massacre perpetrated by the Crusaders in Jerusalem has long been reckoned among the greatest crimes of history. There is no lack of psychological explanations for it, and all historians, those who favor the Crusades and those who do not, rightly blame the state of almost morbid excitement which gripped a rabble made fanatical by the preaching of the holy war....Tancred is know to have promised their lives to several hundred Arab soldiers who had taken refuge of the roof of the al-Aqsa mosque, and he did not conceal his fury when he learned that the prisoners protected by his banner had been slaughtered. "During the days of July 15 and 16 'soldiers of Christ' were masters of the Holy City. They scoured streets and alleys, gardens and courtyards, breaking down doors of houses and mosques and killing, killing all who fell in their path, no longer the soldiers, who had been killed first, but civilians, men, women, children, and old people. "The Jews, or as many of them as the building would hold, were shut up in the synagogue, which was then set of fire. The entire Jewish community of Jerusalem perished in the flames. Ibn al-Athir also records that the Crusaders' rage was particularly directed against imams and ulemas, that they profaned mosques and destroyed Moslem holy books. What is certain is that these manifestations of fanaticism wer only one aspect of the murderous rage which took hold of the army on that day, because it is a fact that women and children were massacred without mercy.... "Exactly how many we shall never know, because the figures given the medieval chroniclers are vague and certainly exaggerated. Ibn al-Athir (and Abu'l Feda) mention seventy thousand killed in the mosque of al-Aqsa alone (according to other versions this includes the sector of the city surrounding the mosque). But is is a known fact that there were fewer than seventy thousand inhabitants in the whole city at the time of the siege. If we can subtract the number driven out before the siege began, there can not have been more than fifty thousand in July 1099, not including the garrison, which probably numbered some two to three thousand men. Even so, a number of the people are known to have succeeded in escaping, and makin their way out of the city, as there was a whole suburb in Damascus founded by survivors from the siege of Jerusalem. "It is clear, however, from both Latin and Moslem historians that the population was more or less completely exterminated. This means that between July 15 and 16, 1099, the Crusaders who, according to the estimates of modern historians, numbered at most ten thousand, killed nearly forty thousand people, the great majority of whom were unarmed civilians. ... "William, [Archbishop] of Tyre, writing ninety years afterward, describes the scene: 'The city offered a spectacle of such a slaughter of enemies, such a profusion of bloodshed, that the vitors themselves could not help but be struckwith horror and disgust.' .... But contemporary historians of the event make no mention of any feelings of remorse on the part of the Crusaders when they saw the monstrous deeds they had committed. On the contrary, Albert of Aix (himself a churchman) stresses the joy of the victors at the magnitude of their victory and makes no attempt to condemn or even to exonerate the authors of the massacre. God had triumphed. The streets of the Holy City were literally running with blood, and neither the Anonymi nor Raymond of Aguilers appears to have paused to reflect that this was the blood of innocent people.... "In fact, the only word of regret or blame connected with the whole affair is the anger of Tancred, and this is simply the anger of a soldier who, having promised other soldiers their lives, has to suffer the indignity of having his work broken for him....Raymond of Saint-Giles did succeed in protecting his captives -- the governor of the city with a number of his officers and a contingent of mamelukes and Arabs...But because he had been the only one who took prisoners, he was immediately accused of treachery by the Crusaders from the North. "On the evening of that terrible July 15, while the massacre was still raging in the city, the barons went all together to the Chruch of the Holy Sepulcher....William of Tyre again, on the basis of earlier witnesses, gives a deeply moving description of the religious fervor of these barons on reaching the end of their pilgrimage.... "Two hundred yards outside the holy Sepulcher, men were still murdering others blindly and savagely, wading in blood and trampling on corpses, on thousands upon thousand of corpses belonging to people whos skins, it was true, were somehwat darker that their own and who did not dress like Christians.....The massacre of the polulation of Jerusalem filled the entire Moslem world with horror." YOU WANTED FOOTNOTES? YOU GOT EM.
Rating: 
Summary: Good read, but lacks authority
Review: Reston's narrative is, for lack of a better word, "juicy." Perhaps too juicy. He colors personalities and nationalities with broad strokes. For instance, while at times citing sources which he admits to be biased, such as the English view of the French attitude during the Crusade, he isn't adverse to applying adjectives as if they were factual, such as "whiny" to the French crusaders who had to leave the comforts of Acre. Perhaps they were whiny, and speculation serves well enough in this instance -- but source material would be helpful. And, at times, Reston quotes historical figures verbatim, sometimes entire paragraphs -- which means there must be a source for the quotes, but Reston doesn't provide them. Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I was uncomfortably aware that, with its lack of source material and Reston's proclivity to add adjectives, I probably wasn't getting as complete a picture as I wanted. The book is categorized as "History," but without the academic -- if boring -- authority behind it, it may well be categorized under "Historical Fictional Nonfiction." Reston probably needed a more historically informed editor.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: Keep in mind I am still in the midst of reading this book but it is so good that I had to put in a good word here. This book is just so informative yet it is not like a history book. It reads like a novel, it feels that way. Makes you think kind of book yet you learn something new. There are cliffhangers at the end of chapters and it is broken up in to many chapters, with each word on the page all coming up to explain the chapter's name. This is a book for anyone who has a hunger for knowledge for medieval history.
Rating:
Summary: Too black and white
Review: This is a biased account but entertaining none the less.
If only things in real life were as plain as this book portrays events between the middle east and the west. Not to detract from the skill with which the narrative was written, but the book left me questioning the objectiveness of the author. Of course, all history is written with a human bias, but Reston seems to favor Saladin's side heavily.
To start, this book attempts to be fair to both the western crusaders and the muslim defenders; in depth history is given about both protagonists so we can understand their motives for joining the war and perhaps empathize with them. However, once we reach the actual events in the middle east, Reston contiunally calls the actions of the Crusaders barbaric and harsh. Even their champion, Richard the Lionheart, is belittled; his incredible feats of survival in battle are criticized as too brash and reckless. Even though this may be true, he is not given as much credit for his leadership abilities as Saladin, who is only portrayed throughout the book as pious, righteous, brilliant, and merciful. This was clearly a romanticized potrayal of the respectable Muslim leader.
For example, Richard is criticized for slaying his muslim captives after the stalled concession talks after his capture of Acre, and rightly so, but Saladin is never condemned by the author when he slays his christians captives after the battle of Arsuf and during the march to Ascalon. This book is not without merit; the author writes in a light, sometimes whimsical narrative. He never gets side-tracked with too many details or techinical aspects of the battles, and keeps the story moving. His heavy reliance on the acounts of bards and court biographers must have made reporting the facts a hard task indeed. But he does a good job with taking the reader on a journey through those sweltering hot days in the holy land.
If you are looking for unbiased and footnote heavy information on the third crusade, look elsewhere. If you want a quick novella on the subject, you've found it. Its an above-average introduction to the third crusade.
| 
