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Historical Saladin: All Powerful Sultan and the Uniter of Islam by Stanley Lane-Poole $18.95 / Cooper Square Press / 2002 In this work, Stanley Lane-Poole provides an excellent understanding of the earliest conflicts between Christendom and the Islamic world, through his story of the life of the Muslim warrior Saladin. Though Lane-Poole's prose sometimes seems a bit dated in this recently re-published book, it does not detract from the clarity of presentation, nor its modern relevance. The western reader may be surprised to learn that "in this struggle the virtues of civilization, magnanimity, tolerance, real chivalry, and gentle culture were all on the side of the Saracens." England's King Richard the Lionheart, for example, gave the order to behead 2,700 captives outside the city of Acre, where even women and children were killed. The Crusaders also rarely honored treaties with the infidels-unlike Saladin, who faithfully kept his treaties with the Crusaders. Saladin, supreme leader of Islam, died in Damascus in 1193 at the age of 55. He had given away all his wealth and was buried in a simple, private ceremony. He was widely admired and respected by his subjects and, even more unusually, by many enemies of his faith. Lane-Poole's book is admirable in its objectivity and interesting in its insight into the background of a distant conflict whose echoes are still heard to this very day. --Ron Hunka

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