Crusade For Liberation

A young man walks down an empty street to find himself in a confrontation with three, something beyond human, beings. Vampires are real and these seemed to be out for his blood. After his escape, he sets himself upon a course filled with violence, danger, and the unknown. A requisite for this course includes abandoning his identity in order to go underground in this mission to protect humans and hunt the undead. He must learn effective means of protecting himself, and taking down his prey, as well as adapting to and countering the many surprising abilities of that prey. A few years into this self-appointed crusade, he arrives too late to save a woman from a group of vampires. After destroying them he goes to the woman inches from death who tries to give a last request. Dying before she could utter her plea, he tracked down her car to learn more about her. In the back seat he finds a sleeping six week old baby girl. On top of the crusade, he now goes through the trials and tribulations of fatherhood. The deeper into the vampire world he goes the more complexities he discovers. There are communities and groups of highly advanced, organized, and immensely powerful vampires which he encounters, interacts with, and ultimately plays a significant role in events that will shape the future of humankind.

Integrating interviews with individuals ranging from senior policymakers to frontline soldiers, a look at the Persian Gulf War shows how the conflict transformed modern warfare.

""Riley-Smith marshals his case lucidly.""--Times Literary Supplement ""Riley-Smith's analysis of the formation of Crusading ideology offers a provocative new interpretation. . . . [His] scholarship is impeccable, and he supports his contentions with

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy In An Army at Dawn—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle, he follows the strengthening American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943 and then, mile by bloody mile, fight their way north toward Rome. The Italian campaign's outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by Lieutenant General Mark Clark, one of the war's most complex and controversial commanders, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. And with the liberation of Rome in June 1944, ultimate victory at last began to seem inevitable. Drawing on a wide array of primary source material, written with great drama and flair, this is narrative history of the first rank. With The Day of Battle, Atkinson has once again given us the definitive account of one of history's most compelling military campaigns.

"In his song, Lanqan li jorn, the early-twelfth-century troubadour Jaufre Rudel expresses a sense of wonder and uncertainty about the future, one that he maps onto his perception of geography as complex, interwoven, and often unknowable. The song proclaims Jaufre's intention to travel eastward to the Crusade front as a Christian pilgrim, and to unite there with his beloved Lady (generally understood as the Countess of Tripoli), the object of his amor de loing [love from afar]. Jaufre expresses both ambivalence and a sense of possibility as he prepares to depart outremar. In Jaufre's ideology, distance suggests the multivalent difficulties inherent in this effort--the challenges of geographical travels and unknown roads; the emotional separation between lovers and uncertain pathways; and the subjective distances between the ideals of French courtliness, Christian values, and his imagining of the land of Saracens. Because the pathways that lie before him--the ports and roads--are so many and so unfathomable, Jaufre cannot prophesy the outcome of this journey. As Jaufre contemplated the unknown East, he could not have predicted the impact of the Crusade efforts or the song-making traditions in which he participated. According to his vida, or biographical sketch (although these were often fictionalized), Jaufre would die in the East while on the Crusade venture; having often imagined the Countess of Tripoli, he would become ill on the journey, arriving in the Syrian county only just in time to be embraced his beloved and die in her arms. Jaufre was one of many creators of the Crusade period to contemplate a new world, one marked by Crusading, through song. In doing so, he employed geographical rhetoric in ways that engaged his belief systems about love, politics, religion, and space. In this book, I locate ideologies of early Crusade culture as expressed in the Occitanian song (in the south of modern-day France), particularly in Latin devotional song and troubadour lyric. Such songs engage their Crusading context through text and melody, through metaphors of travel, distance, and geography. I argue that these songs reflect Crusade perspectives, articulate regional beliefs and local identities, and demonstrate the rhetorical and expressive possibilities of music and poetry in combination. Today, in keeping with the concepts of mouvance and re-invention, as articulated by Paul Zumthor and Amelia Van Vleck among others, we understand troubadour song as a site of re-creation rather than fixity. Troubadour songs circulated abundantly in oral transmission, long before they were committed to writing; each performance of a given song was subject to change and reinvention, with performance acting not as repetition, but as an act of re-composition, improvisation, or variation, aided, but not dictated, by memory. Troubadour songs may exist in multiple variant copies across multiple manuscripts, or they may survive today without any written record of their melodies at all, perhaps once so well known that their notation was not needed. Zumthor thus explained, "the 'work' floats, offering not a fixed shape of firm boundaries but a constantly shifting nimbus . . . Although the production of an individual, it [a song] is characterized by the sense of potential incompleteness is caries within itself." As he looked forward uncertainly into his own travels and his future, Jaufre understood his songs as fluid, as templates for further composition, and as sites of communal, rather than individual, creation. Indeed, among the troubadours, Jaufre can be considered an "extremist" (in the words of Amelia Van Vleck) with regard to transmission and re-composition, as he was particularly explicit about inviting others to change and improve upon his song, placing the singer on par with the composer as a creative agent, and rejecting the idea of single or original author with respect to his work. For Jaufre, the audience too played a role in defining the song; the experience of reception essentially contributed to the process of re-creation. Thus Rupert Pickens wrote, regarding his edition of Jaufre's poems: "It soon became apparent . . . that not only can 'authentic' texts not be discovered, much less 'established' . . . but that, given the condition of the manuscripts and the esthetic principles involving textual integrity affirmed by Jaufre himself . . . the question of 'authenticity' . . . was largely irrelevant.""--