After the success of The Templars, Dan Jones—my favourite British historian—is back with yet another captivating and astonishing history lesson. In The Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars
for the Holy Lands (Viking $30) he takes us back a millennium, exploring the reasons behind, and retelling the events of, the biggest conflict between Christianity and Islam in history. Jones has a way of recounting the story as if he was there, making the centuries fall away into a vivid, immediate painting of that distant era. He quickly pulls you into the narrative and you find yourself immersed in the lives of crusaders, slaves, royals, and ordinary people from both sides of the wars. Well researched and brilliantly told, informative and entertaining, Crusaders will have you turning the pages, and it will make you wonder: have we learned anything in the centuries since the events he chronicles, or are we just repeating the past, fighting the same wars for the same reasons?
