After my third visit to this part of the world, I decided to revisit the locales that had become engrained in my memories in the company of a character I had tentatively invented some years back who was in search of a time and place to emerge it seemed. As a retired archaeologist and amateur historian of early time periods I became fascinated with Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, which lasted for a thousand years and has received so little attention in average history books and even college and public school teaching. Constantinople sat at the center of a unique and important world and deserves far more attention than we have often given it.
After traveling to Turkey the first time, I was steered into this book by a friend and found it to be the best modern combination of historical and fiction writing in combination I have read. The author’s amazing use of language and dynamic characters and storylines detailing how the modern nation of Turkey emerged opened my eyes and interest to the larger and longer past I had witnessed there firsthand. This book and my trip fueled my interest in the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, its importance, and its neglect in our knowledge of a place and a past that is too often ignored. Bernieres’ prose is masterful and his ability to take the reader back and forth from his fictional world to the actual events in real-time is gut-gripping but equally satisfying.
Set against the backdrop of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in south-west Anatolia - a town in which Christian and Muslim lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully for centuries.
When war is declared and the outside world intrudes, the twin scourges of religion and nationalism lead to forced marches and massacres, and the peaceful fabric of life is destroyed. Birds Without Wings is a novel about the personal and political costs of war, and about love: between men and women; between friends; between those who are driven to be enemies; and…
Doerr’s follow-up to his amazing bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, is different and intriguing in its own unique way, to say the least. From my own perspective, I was enthralled by his descriptions of the city of Constantinople in its last days before falling to the Turks in 1453. The myriad events Doerr weaves into an amazingly complex, yet ultimately “Oh yeah, that makes sense” story may leave some readers gasping for air, but his ability to create characters and set them in time periods and locales that give the reader a sense of truly being there rather than just watching the action from an easy chair is becoming his deserved trademark.
On the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks * A New York Times Notable Book * A National Book Award Finalist * Named a Best Book of the Year by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more
“If you’re looking for a superb novel, look no further.” —The Washington Post
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, comes the instant New York Times bestseller that is a “wildly inventive, a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences” (The New York Times…
Are you a fan of travel literature? If so, then you will be as amazed as I was to find this remarkable account. In the 1990s, the author, a noted travel writer, undertook a task that would be impossible to duplicate today for obvious reasons. Based upon the contents of a rare manuscript, he decided to trace the footsteps of two eastern orthodox monks who, in the Sixth Century, traveled through much of the Byzantine World, moving from one ancient monastery to another while describing their adventures. Tracing their route, the author relates in a witty, yet always respectful and well-written narrative the many obstacles he and his predecessors 1,300 years earlier faced. “The more things (and people) change the more they stay the same,” if for different reasons, and nothing can point that euphemism out better than this entertaining and informative book of a lost world and a time that may not be as far beyond us as we thought.
In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Using Moschos’s writings as his guide and inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving elegy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The result is Dalrymple’s unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully written travelogue, at once rich and scholarly, moving…
Will we ever be free of the Crusades and how it shaped our modern world? Not according to the author, who brings this idea to the forefront with a new perspective on the role that the Byzantine Empire and the fall of Constantinople in the 11th Century at the hands of western Christian crusaders wrought at the time. Personally, since this story unfolds less than a century after when my own focus on Byzantine history has been the past two years, I was fascinated by Holmes’ thoughtful interpretation of how the fading empire sitting at the center of three diverse cultural centers and their burgeoning religions, all dedicated to overt expansionism, has so often been neglected or overlooked entirely by later historians, even into the present. The Crusades were truly a “World War” at the time, and the author’s ability to connect so many diverse and related pieces of history provide a great service to those of us interested in this dramatic period, one which we too often still find ourselves immersed in the unresolved issues those times bequeathed us.
The Crusades shook the world. But why did they happen?
Their origins are revealed in a new light. As part of a medieval world war that stretched from Asia to Europe. At its centre was an ancient empire - Byzantium.
Told for the first time as a single, linked narrative are three great events that changed history: the fall of Byzantium in the eleventh century, the epic campaign of the First Crusade and the origins of modern Turkey.
Nick Holmes not only presents the First Crusade in a wider global context but he also puts forwards new interpretations of the…
Based upon his classic three-volume earlier work, this book courageously boils down the thousand-year empire into a readable and understandable version. I found this work essential when I first decided to enter into a subject that I had become fascinated with but understood I needed a good, basic entry point to familiarize myself with before contemplating writing even fictional subject matter on the vast topic. It is not for nothing that we use the term “byzantine” as an adjective to denote complex or intricate issues, or so one discovers from Norwich’s easily readable synthesis. Still, this masterwork sorts out a thousand years of what has seemingly become one of the least understood and taught subjects of our own past as we move farther away from it in time and our focus has become more ethnocentric and biased toward the European viewpoint. I felt I knew these people well enough after reading this book that I could take on the task of writing about them as real people, and I continually find myself revisiting their world in one fashion or another through frequent referrals to this book.
"Norwich is always on the lookout for the small but revealing details. . . . All of this he recounts in a style that consistently entertains." --The New York Times Book Review
In this magisterial adaptation of his epic three-volume history of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich chronicles the world's longest-lived Christian empire. Beginning with Constantine the Great, who in a.d. 330 made Christianity the religion of his realm and then transferred its capital to the city that would bear his name, Norwich follows the course of eleven centuries of Byzantine statecraft and warfare, politics and theology, manners and art.
The year is AD 950 and Constantine VII, the new emperor of the Byzantine world, has a problem. Once again, he must turn to his secret group of protectors and their best agent, Peter Menzies aka John Daedalus, The Emperor’s Man, to protect his fragile throne from the many threatening forces and the men who would take it from him. Using his particular skills, Peter and his tiny circle of associates must first unravel and then solve the tangled puzzle he has stumbled upon before the emperor he serves is faced with destruction.
I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction and by Biblical Scripture. That may seem dichotomous to some, but not to me. I have a passion for science and for Scripture because both bring understanding about our world from the microcosm to the macrocosm. My writings are a mixture of science and mystery with a science fiction feel and a Christian perspective. I like stories that show how truth arises even from the dark, confusing, and ambiguity of life to help one discover something about God they may not have considered before, and at the same time enjoy a fun, fast-paced, and exciting journey as they read.
Killion is born several generations after the establishment of the Cities of Light which now sprinkle each continent of the world, places where God’s spirit produces a tangible presence felt by all who enter. Yet he is raised outside these cities, under the direction of Adar, who teaches his followers that such cities are dangerous, run by cult leaders, kill any who disagree with their teachings, and should be avoided at all costs.
But circumstances cause Killion to enter a City of Light, and this begins his journey of discovery. What he experiences here doesn’t match what he thought he…
What if the knowledge of God's glory covered the earth like the waters cover the sea?
Killion is born several generations after the establishment of the Cities of Light which now sprinkle each continent of the world, places where God’s spirit produces a tangible presence felt by all who enter. Yet he is raised outside these cities, under the direction of Adar, who teaches his followers that such cities are dangerous, run by cult leaders, kill any who disagree with their teachings, and should be avoided at all costs.
But circumstances cause Killion to enter a City of Light, and…
