Review by Booklist Review
Tyerman has devoted his career to studying the Crusades, those military expeditions sanctioned and blessed by the pope or other high prelate of the Catholic Church, from the First Crusade (1096-9) almost to the seventeenth century (crusading privileges covered the Spanish Armada attacking England in 1588). Crusade objectives included, besides liberating Jerusalem from Muslim rulers, doing the same from Egypt to Turkey, conquering pagans in the Baltic region, evicting the Moors from Spain, and expunging Christian heresies in France, Italy, and Bohemia. The main text of this copiously illustrated volume chronicles all of the Crusades and the waxing and waning of the crusading impulse. Two-to-four-page inserts every few pages home in on a particular person, event, place, practice, or aspect, with titles that state their subjects: Taking the Cross, Interpreters, Jews and the Crusade, Communes on Crusade, The Children's Crusade, Sieges, Maps, and many more. The last chapter, Crusading: Our Contemporary?, surveys the controversial historiography and cultural impact of the Crusades to the present day. An authoritative and beautiful browsing reference.--Bridget Thoreson Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Debut author Bilski weaves a narrative of horses and friendship in windswept Iceland in this transportive memoir. Bilski, a married mother of two working as a Yale administrator, on a whim joins a trip to a horse farm in northern Iceland in 2004. At first, she and the other eight women at the farm are strangers, but they soon bond over their love of Icelandic horses and, over each of the following 11 years, the group returns to the farm. In an episodic, straightforward narrative, Bilski shares moments of life on the farm, including horse husbandry ("this is an equine love story and we all go gushy") and being dive-bombed by Arctic terns intent on keeping her away from their nests. Each year in June, the women left behind worries about finances, health scares, children, and parents in declining health for a month of riding along weather-beaten trails in Iceland's near-constant daylight, where "I am peacefully alone and temporarily lost." In 2015, Helga, the farm's owner, announces that she has sold the farm, but Bilski and three of the women travel back for one last nostalgic look at the farm and stay at another horse ranch--but it's not the same, and it's unclear whether they'll return to Iceland. Those with adventurous spirits and healthy amounts of wanderlust will devour this charming memoir. (May)
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