Rating: 
Summary: Excellent primer for the Crusades
Review: This is essentially not history; it is a melodrama based, more or less loosely, on the Third Crusade. Its Saladin and Richard are the characters a novelist would have them be -- tailored to fit his plot line, thinking the thoughts he wants them to think, driven by the desires and emotions he wants them to have. Any relationship between these shallow, crudely-drawn characters and the real thing is not only accidental but unimportant. The point of the book is to teach the reader that there were good guys and bad guys and that we (the West) were the bad guys, while throwing in sex and violence in the bargain. And so it presents a simplified, technicolor version that leaves out the historical doubts, factual uncertainties, and other shades of grey that make for good history but bad B movies.Who were the good guys and who the bad? Read Runciman's books (his Volume 3 covers the Third Crusade) -- they present history and let you decide for yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Learn about this crusade -- skip the author's
Review: This is of a piece with most "revisionist" histories, in which the author bends over backwards to discredit popular history to seemingly prove his lack of bias. As a result, the bias becomes obvious. It's relevant to note that this book was written shortly before 9/11, making cruelly ironic Reston's assertion that the fact that "the word 'jihad' strikes fear in the hearts of many Westerners who associate it with terrorism and Islamic fanaticism" amounts to "an irony of history." Forces of Islam are involved in hot spots ranging from as far West as Algeria and as far east as the Philippines, and include many areas in between: Bosnia, Sudan, Israel, India, Chechnya, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. Very few of these conflicts, if any, can trace its root cause to what happened between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin centuries ago, despite the author's "crusade" to show otherwise. Read this book for its excellent account of the Third Crusade. Be shocked at the cruelties that occured, mostly on the Crusader's side. Skip the tendentious linking of the Third Crusade to the root cause of everything.
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