I finished reading Brian Catlos' Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors last night, and it's really good. I could totally nitpick here and there about characterisations I don't like or areas where I think his statements are a touch more sweeping than I'd like, but honestly that's basically just par for the course for anything written for a more general audience and not worth getting in a twist over.

It does a lot of really great things, though, and it's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in the Crusades as a period rather than the narrative of the individual Crusades. Several of the things I really liked about it were:

• All the al-Andalus stuff. I don't really study this area, so it was great to get a high level discussion of the taifa kings period and early Almoravid period.
• The overall thesis of the book. Catlos is focusing on the relationships between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in this period and how regional and class concerns often transcended religious divides. It's a great antidote to a lot of pop culture depictions of the Crusading Period as being at its core a conflict of religions rather than a political conflict that featured a lot of religious people.
• The Fatimids chapters. The Fatimids are often left to the periphery of Crusading histories - they're an important player but rarely is their story ever told from their perspective. Instead they are a passive state to be acted upon by the Abbasids and Crusaders. By telling their story from the perspective of the Fatimids themselves Catlos gives a really interesting perspective on their role in the period. He's not the first person to ever do this, of course, but it's the first time I've come across it in a work for popular audiences.

Overall, it's good, check it out.

Does anyone have any recommendations for books that are about the Korean War, particularly ones that focus on the North Korean/Soviet/Chinese side of it? It's not a topic that I know a ton about, and I'm interested to learn more about it. I'm not opposed to books that are more American/South Korean focused though, if anyone thinks that they're also worth reading

Why on earth is William Urban’s Prussian Crusade $600 on Amazon?! I got The Livonian and samigitian Crusade books for a regular book’s price.

Looking for good Central Asian history prior Islam. Online source like JSTOR journals or e-books preferred since it's hard to get imported physical books here.

I am about to finish reading "The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999" by Timothy Snyder and I am blown away by the style of writing and how interesting the topic is. I would love to read something similar about different region or something more in-depth on the same region as this book is, so any recommendations for that would be really appreciated!

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Also I would like to recommend this book "The 'Russian' Civil Wars, 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World" by Jonathan Smele to be added to the booklist under category of "Russia". The book is extremely well written and looks at the Russian civil war military and political aspects, focusing quite a lot on the borderlands of the former Russian empire.

Has anyone read 1066: The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry by Andrew Bridgeford? Would you recommend it?

Anyone know if I can get a printed English copy of the Rule of the Teutonic Order?

Uh...does anyone know how/where I can track down a 19th century New York newspaper called the Subterranean?

Does anyone know material specifically about (large) famines? Preferably from early Medieval to early modern period, European, but anything would help really.

Any recommendations for a Leonardo Da Vinci biography?

Hey gang,

I'm fairly well versed in travel, tourism, and protected areas in the United States, but does anyone have reading recommendations on protected places (parks, preserves, etc) for the rest of the globe?