Excerpt… Between the Hindu Kush and Baghdad, summer, 1323 Johanna was no match for Firas in upper body strength, but he made her practice with a heavy wooden practice sword for a month before he found a small sword in another market which weighed half of what the practice sword did. She discarded the first…
Excerpt… On the Road, summer, 1323 “TELL ME ABOUT the Templars,” Jaufre said. Alaric sighed. To Jaufre’s ears it sounded a little theatrical. “First, I beg you, please rid yourself of the habit of calling me Alaric the Templar,” the older man said. “Ram will have his little joke, but the farther west we travel,…
Read more “I beg you, please rid yourself of the habit of calling me Alaric the Templar.”
Talikan, spring, 1323 JOHANNA HAD NEVER been so bored. There was no lack of comfort in the harem, that was true enough. The blue-tiled floors had been built over a hypocaust, and were warm both winter and summer. So was the water in the rectangular bath that stretched the length of the main room. The…
On the importance of setting. Can’t remember who I wrote this for. The US Coast Guard invited me to do a ridealong on cutter Alex Haley in the Bering Sea in February of 2004. I was invited to write a daily blog from the ship so the shorebound families of the crew could eyewitness as…
[for the Poisoned Pen Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, July 13, 2012] Sometimes research is easy. When I lived in Anchorage my house was right under the traffic pattern to the seaplane base of Lake Hood. One day my father was helping me with something in my back yard and a Cessna 206…
What a delightfully informative little book! I don’t know how they crammed so much information into just 200 pages (reminds me of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and this one doesn’t have recipes). (And why not, I ask? Hmmph.) The authors take something called the Julius Work Calendar,…
Less than two hundred pages packed with information on the title subject, written in lively prose and illustrated mostly with line drawings from the times, plus a few photographs. Where else are you going find out that during the Middle Ages An amusement gallery was sometimes run in conjunction with a medieval zoo…In these galleries…
Cahill is determined to redeem the Middle Ages from the likes of William Manchester (A World Lit Only By Fire) and Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). On the contrary, Cahill writes The reputation of the Middle Ages for thuggish cruelty is largely (if not wholly) undeserved. which I find a bit…
A wealth of detail in this you-are-there look at life in medieval England. Just dipping in at random: When you draw closer to the city walls you will see the great gatehouse…And then you notice the smell. Four hundred yards from the city gate, the muddy road you are folowing crosses a brook. As you…
Henry II to Richard II, 250 years’ worth of Plantagenet kings in 500 plus pages. Written briskly and with humor, the narrative hits all the highlights of this era in British history without missing the low points, of which there were plenty, and debunking myths along the way. Henry II hid out in Ireland for…
Read more You could get whiplash, reading through John’s reign.