Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land by Steve Tibble
In 1095, when Pope Urban II called upon the Christian West to “free the churches of the East”, he unleashed two centuries of bloodshed and hubris. If the Crusades started in piety, the reality of Holy War was anything but noble. In this book, slangily subtitled “The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land”, the crusader historian Steve Tibble shows that the armies that headed towards Jerusalem included innumerable criminals among the faithful. “The real problem of the crusades,” he writes, “was not religion. It was young men. Dislocated. Disinhibited. And in disturbingly large numbers.”
The conditions made misconduct and violence inevitable – “otherness”, a mix of nationalities, food shortages, extreme conditions, a culture of war, imported prostitutes… Tibble’s meticulous narrative details a cast of bootleggers and kidnappers, gamblers and muggers, among them Brother Bertrin of Gagnac of the Hospitaller order, who was a murderer and embezzler; Godric of Finchale, a pirate turned hermit; and Count Walter IV of Brienne who killed his captor, a local emir, by hitting him over the head with a chessboard during an argument. As Tibble recounts, the crusaders’ Muslim foes were every bit as brutal.
By Michael Prodger
Yale University Press, 384pp, £25. Buy the book
The Boundless River: Stories from the Realm of the Rhine by Mathijs Deen
When the Dutch writer Mathijs Deen first considered writing a biography of the Rhine, he imagined the river as a character that “must have a birth and a death”. Not so, a palaeogeographer later told him: “The Rhine was always there.” So instead of telling a straightforward account of the river’s existence, he “rambles through the no-man’s-land between man and nature, imagination and science”, charting a course through pre-European history through to the present day. He traces the stories of a curious cast of characters – a young Goethe and a Roman general; a North Sea fisherman and a determined salmon looking to lay her eggs – who have a profound connection to the river.
It’s an odd premise, but it’s easy to be swept away by Deen’s delightful prose. Volcanoes that rise and fall are “hell raisers with short lives”; following the river’s terrain, he writes that “sometimes a bed silts up, as if the river were getting in its own way”. In his conclusion, Deen notes that geology makes him feel “small and arbitrary” and “surprised by my surroundings”. It’s to his credit that The Boundless River has a similar effect on the reader.
By Megan Gibson
MacLehose Press, 320pp, £22. Buy the book
Systemic: How Racism Is Making Us Ill by Layal Liverpool
Death and sickness have often been described as the “great equaliser”. But they are anything but equal. In her first book, the science journalist and former biomedical researcher Layal Liverpool forensically dissects the institutional racism that causes people of colour to become sicker than their white counterparts, from higher maternity death rates and lower cancer survival rates to missed diagnoses. Liverpool was inspired to write Systemic after she was tasked by the New Scientist in 2021 to investigate whether “coronavirus was racist”, given more people of colour were dying from it. What she realised is that racism is a “public health crisis”.
Using robust data, interviews and research, she dismantles the outdated, damaging belief that ill health is simply down to personal responsibility or individual genetics. Instead, she looks at the influence of prejudice, from un-diverse medical research cohorts to people of colour consistently having their concerns dismissed. Liverpool’s book is a call to arms for a drastic societal shift: for everyone (particularly medical professionals) to recognise that racism is as bad for your health as smoking, drinking or eating unhealthy food.
By Sarah Dawood
Bloomsbury Circus, 352pp, £22. Buy the book
An Absence of Cousins by Lore Segal
On a warm summer’s day, Maggie sits on a blanket continuing to “bite and nibble a family – a community – of apple bites”. She is surrounded by friends and acquaintances, a “set”, that her Viennese-born mother, Ilka, created for herself as an Austrian refugee upon arriving in the fictional American town of Concordance.
In her latest novel, the 96-year-old Pulitzer finalist Lore Segal puts community and the sense of belonging at the heart of the story. Ilka’s lack of family propels her into a search for surrogates. Segal’s direct, clipped prose creates emotional detachment from the characters, allowing for an objective view of the awkwardness of building a network. Ilka longs to be a “naturalised American”, rejecting her heritage and being selective of those around her. Any attempts at friendship from a fellow Viennese refugee, Gerti, are rejected though both are searching for adoptive cousins.
The desire for companionship, even if the relations are strained, is the defining element of An Absence of Cousins. Just like Maggie, all the characters are trying to carve out their own “set” of people (in place of apple bites) whether they are aware of it or not.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Sort of Books, 256pp, £9.99. Buy the book
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk