The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades
By Paul M. Cobb
Published in September 2016
360 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 4/5

After reading God’s Battalions, a mediocre book written by a modern day Catholic to defend the morality of actions taken by crusaders almost 1000 years ago, I had low expectations. I’ve also read The Ornament of the World, a book written by a modern leftist that justly praises the achievements of Islamic Spain while completely ignoring the rape, genocide, and oppression of that regime.

I kind of expected the Race for Paradise to be in the same tradition - I thought it would be a snuff job to cover up past atrocities and justify modern political ideas.

Instead, I was very pleasantly surprised to find a well written and in depth history of the crusades from an Islamic perspective without any modern political commentary.

Paul M. Cobb is a non-Muslim Islamic history specialist who took previously untrasnalted Islamic sources, and built a narrative history of the crusades using those.

I learned so many fascinating details which really helped me understand the crusades. For example, the Muslims didn’t perceive the crusades as a large scale apocalyptic event. Some local Muslim rulers even supported the crusaders with supplies and free passage hoping that they would fight their internal political enemies within the Islamic ummah.

Few of the stories in this book were new to me, as I’ve read many of the same ones in the many other crusades books that I’ve read. However, the emphasis was on different details and different characters.

The audiobook is also very well recorded. It is read by the author, which is always the best. It also came with a downloadable file that includes diagrams of all of the maps that are included in the original book.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who knows a little about the crusades but wants to learn more from a different perspective. Really good and well produced audiobook version.

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God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades
By Rodney Stark
Published in November 2010
288 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 2/5

God’s Battalions can be understood as a hyperpartisan history of the crusades written by a modern Catholic to justify any and all atrocities committed by Christians at the time.

That being said, there is nothing inherently wrong with a hyper partisan historical text, however its bias must be understood for what it is.

The book itself is a short narrative of events surrounding the rise of Islam in the centuries before the crusade and a milktoast narrative of the first 3 canonical crusades.

Although I finished the book, I didn’t learn all that much from it. I mostly read it to contrast it with pro-Arab hyper partisan histories I am also reading in parallel to this book.

I do not recommend this book, except for the purpose of contrasting it with biased books written from the Arab perspective.

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The Crusades
By Zoe Oldenbourg
Published in 1966
672 pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5


The Crusades is a history textbook that covers the history of the first three Middle Eastern crusades.


I found that The Crusades managed to strike a neat balance between being a narrative history covering major events and major players and an experiential history describing the daily life of people.


Learning about the economics and logistics of the crusades is always fascinating, and this book more than delivers. I especially enjoyed the description of the events in the interim between the second and third crusade. Learning about the succession of warlords that preceded Saladin, ultimately leading to the fall of the Fatimid caliphate, are often ignored yet very important.


I also enjoyed learning about the degree of cultural mixing between the crusaders and Muslims. I was most surprised when I learned about the tentative anti Turk alliance between the Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo and the Byzantine Empire.


Zoe Oldenbourg draws many interesting and unconventional conclusions which shed light on the events of the crusades. For example, she excoriates Richard Lionheart as an incompetent fool who doomed the Kingdom of Jerusalem to fall permanently to Islam. She also concludes that female slaves taken into the harems fared the best of all of the female slaves.


Overall, I cannot recommend this book to average readers. It is too long and too detailed to be of interest to a general audience - it also is pretty advanced and requires a significant understanding of the crusades to be appreciated.


I do recommend this book to amateur historians and nerds interested in a deep dive into the history of the period and region.

The House of Wisdom: The remarkable story of how medieval Arab scholars made dazzling advances in science and philosophy and of the itinerant Europeans who brought this knowledge back to the West
By Jonathan Lions and Jim Al-Khalili
Published in January 2009
320 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 4/5

I decided to read this book after I saw Jim Al-Khalili’s 2015 Al Jazeera documentary series about the Islamic Golden Age.

Jim Al-Khalili is an atheist Iraqi British physicist living in the UK who, in addition to studying science directly, also studies the history of science. I found his documentary series to be very interesting, and his book, accordingly, did not disappoint.

This book covers how Islam went from a religion followed by backwards Arab nomads into the world’s most advanced reigning civilization for centuries.

Al-Khalili’s main argument is that the medieval Muslims, like other civilizations that rapidly progressed, did not do so from scratch. Instead, they did so by incorporating the knowledge of past civilizations such as the Greeks, Romans, Indians, Persians, and Chinese into their own.

The House of Wisdom’s main focus is the translation movement, which was funded by the Caliphs in order to transcribe the learning of other civilizations into Arabic. Al-Khalili argues that Islam achieved its high level of progress by understanding and assimilating this information, then building upon it.

Interestly enough, this model of civilizational progress seems to hold true for other civilizations - the Italian renaissance would, in turn, draw its own inspiration from the Islamic Golden Age.

In this book I learned about a wide variety of early scientific advancements made by the Muslims. This includes extensive progress in medicine, optics, and chemistry.  Al-Khalili also covers Islamic scholarship in other areas such as theology and philosophy, albeit in less detail.

Most interesting was how the Muslim scholars integrated the Indian concept of “zero” with Greek mathematics to create modern math as we would understand it today. If it hadn’t been for the Arabic ability to integrate knowledge from different regions in Eurasia, the development of mathematics would have been significantly delayed.

Even modern scientific language often originates from Arabic. For example, the word “algebra” comes from the bastardized Arab word “al-jabr” which means the union of broken parts. Other obvious examples starting with “al” include “alchemy,” “alkaline,” and “alcohol.” Many stars were first named and observed by Muslims, as well as a wide variety of botanical names.

The scientifically curious and philosophically pondering Islam from the Abbasid Golden Age is long gone. Now, it has been replaced with a backwards and inwards looking religion that fails to produce quality scientists and thinkers.

The House of Wisdom offers modern readers a glimpse of a time when Islam was very different, and when Muslims led the world’s thinkers.

Overall, this book is a must read for anyone interested in several categories of knowledge: the history of science, Islam, or the Middle Ages. This book is well written, easy to listen to as an audiobook, and accessible to just about anyone.

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The Intelligent Investor
By Benjamin Graham (Updated by Warren Buffet and Jason Zweig)
Originally Published in 1949 (This edition updated in February 2006)
640 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5

The Intelligent Investor was originally published in 1949, but has been regularly updated every decade or so since. The result is that the original spirit of Benjamin Graham is there, at the bottom of the book, but the actual book I read recently is a mess of statistics and examples from a wide variety of disconnected decades.

I didn’t really like the Intelligent Investor that much. I thought that the advice was very much in the category of “do this do that” rather than a systematic explanation of concepts.

I was looking for a book that would tell me in depth what a stock and bond was, why people bought and sold them, and about the laws.

Instead of a descriptive work, this work is almost entirely prescriptive.

The book gives specific advice such as putting 75% of your money in stocks, and 25% in other instruments. It also gives vague advice like “don’t speculate.”

This book is great for average sophistication and intelligence people who have no idea what to do on the stock market with their life savings. It is essentially useless for people who just want to understand financial markets in greater depth.

That being said, there is good advice. Avoiding highly speculative investments, being conservative, and focusing on not losing rather than making big wins are all good to know. I like how he stresses to avoid the crowds.

This advice meshes well with the advice I’ve gotten from the many extremely rich and successful investors I’ve met.

However, some of his advice doesn’t mesh at all with what I’ve heard from the wise and successful.

For example, he advises against investing in industries that you are familiar with because you will enter the market with biases. This might be true for people who are doing things at a low level and have enough knowledge to be at the top of the Dunning-Kruger curve. However, this does not apply to people who are working at higher levels or as industry analysts. It also does not apply to people who have a pessimistic bias, only to those who have either an optimistic or greedy bias.

I recommend this book to anyone who is tempted by get rich quick schemes, but not to anyone else. Anyone who believes that ICOs, penny stocks, hot tech stocks, and amateur day trading will get them rich needs to read this book to disillusion them from their dangerous beliefs.

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed
By James Scott
Published in 1999
460 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 5/5

This is one of the best books I have read since I have started reviewing books. It is one of the few books that is a must read for everybody.

James Scott explains how the perceptions states have, which are often based off statistical ideation, often fail to align with reality. The result is that well intentioned policies often turn into disastrous affairs which ruin the lives of real people.

The book, despite having been written 20 years ago, is still completely relevant.

He goes over numerous examples of state policies throughout history, and explains how they failed because the states which sought to implement them did not perceive the realities on the ground. Scott’s examples are clear, interesting, and wide ranging through time and space.

Whether discussing forestry in Prussia, agriculture in the Soviet Union, or urbanization in Brazil, James Scott always impresses. His examples are so interesting and clearly written, that the reader always immediately understands what he wants to say.

This is the single best book I’ve ever read, with perhaps one or two exceptions, that explains why government policies fail.

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Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain
By Joseph F. O'Callaghan
Published in September 2013
344 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 4/5

After reading two very biased histories about Spain in the Middle Ages, this book was a refreshing clear headed and impartial analysis of the period.

The Ornament of the World was biased towards the idea that Islamic reign was peaceful and tolerant. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise was specifically written to refute the arguments laid out in The Ornament of the World.

Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain acknowledges the achievements and horrors of both Islamic and Christian reigns. It was not written as an attempt to alter or rewrite the nature of history, or promote a political agenda.

The book focuses especially on the reconquest period, although it does briefly discuss the initial Arab occupation of Iberia. One key argument made by the author is that the Christian reconquest of Spain can be classified as a proper crusade, and fell well within the tradition of Middle Eastern crusades.

I recommend this book as a good starting place for people who want to learn more about the wars between Christians and Muslims in Spain throughout the Middle Ages, and does not want to be bombarded with a modern political opinion.

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