JW

Amazing book. This was a period of time that has a lot of terms that many people have heard, but I feel like I never learned a lot about it from school. This book gives a thorough history of the crusades from both sides, and dives into a lot of the finer details. For a 200 year period, this book did a great job of covering a lot of the big events. I also enjoyed how the author used both contemporary and modern sources. This, along with his writing style, made me feel as if I was at a history lecture by self in the best way possible.

This was a book that I started to read multiple times but I wasn't able to get into it due to the unique writing style. The book isn't broken up into chapters, and it starts at a slow pace which made it difficult to find good stopping points early on. This, along with the writing style consisting of many run-on sentences, is what blocked me mentally from truly diving into it. Once I finally did, however, it was well worth it.

This book has a lot of dark themes over human nature and how we as people react in grim circumstances. In this post-apocalyptic world there are many gruesome acts that made me wince while reading, and during this journey with a father and son they were plentiful. As I continued reading and getting past that initial slump, I found myself reading long chunks of pages without even realizing it as I was so engrossed in this book. The ending was definitely surprising to me and I think that it summed up the world very well while showing both sides of humanity.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes dark apocalyptic stories. The only true ding in this book is the writing style, but if you can get through that you will easily find this book worthy of reading again.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author does a great job of breaking up the various aspects of the war of 1812 into separate aspects that makes it more digestible. His writing style keeps you interested and gives great aspects of both the successes and failures from the US perspective. I picked up his other book on the French and Indian War and look forward to diving further into North American history.