The Crusades through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

 

I love history.  The Crusades has always been a topic that I was drawn to.  The world changed after the Crusades.  I've always read books from the Christian or Western point of view.  This book was fascinating because all the sources were from Muslim Chronicles.  I can now understand why and how the first crusade was so successful.  The Muslim world (like Europe) was fractured.  Egypt was not friends with the Turks.  Baghdad wasn't getting on with Damascus and so forth and so forth.  In many ways the east were far advanced in science, medicine and obviously mathematics.  Algebra was one of the things that came to Europe because of the Crusades (art, medical practices and the carrier pigeon were other things that the Europeans took back with them). 

 

Muslims saw the Christians are barbarians.  Uneducated blood thirsty warriors(there were a few stories of Christians eating Muslims that they had just killed).  It would take 200 years before Saladin was able to bring forces together to finally kick them out of the Holy Land.  The author goes on to explain while the Christians took so many things back with them the Muslims rejected everything and anything Christian.  This maybe as simple as invader/invaded.  The conquerors take and the invaded reject.  In fact many Muslims believe Crusades are still going on in the middle east and have a mistrust of the west dating back to the 1100.  This book is a must read for all the history buffs out there.  It takes a different spin on a sad and desperate time. 

 

I rate this book 10/10.

 

I am now reading Brave new world by Aldous Huxley

Oscar Wilde and C.S. Lewis

 

 

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde and A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis are two of the saddest memoirs I have ever read.  2 modern day literary giants at the lowest points of their lives and its documented in these wonderful reads.

 

De Profundis finds Oscar Wilde in prison serving a 2 year sentence for gross indecency.  Meaning he was in prison for being gay.  De Profundis released in 1905 (5 years after his death) is a letter written to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas.  Wilde is defeated in this memoir.  The world has broken him.  Gone is the witty and humorous Wilde.  He has been replaced by a sad beaten man.  Still present is his genius.  He weaves his magic and we see inside his soul.  If only Wilde lived in an age where his sexual preference mattered little.  How many more works of brilliance would we have? 

 

 

A Grief Observed has C.S. Lewis devastated after the death of his wife to bone cancer.  Lewis married later in life and the death of his wife had him question his relationship with God.  In the early chapters he wonders if God actually exists.  I found this fascinating.  C.S. Lewis one of the greatest modern Christian apologists is at the cross roads.  This made me love Lewis even more.  I like writers that have dirt under their fingernails and this sad lament was moving.  As the book draws to a close the writer renews his relationship with God and we see a hopeful Lewis look forward to his future.

 

If you want to see two masters at work pick up De Profundis and A Grief Observed.  You will not be disappointed.

 

The next book I will be reading is The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.