Reston characterizes Islam as the 'native faith' of the Holy Land and states that, 'In the first instance was a Christian Holy War that was met in response and in reaction by the Muslim concept of jihad' (pp. The Christians are the aggressors in his drama, they are less civilized, less religious, more greedy, and more savage. If anything, he seems to prefer his Muslim subjects, and his treatment of the Christians as a whole is generally pejorative in tone.

Reston apparently desired to avoid a Western bias in his account, and in this he has certainly succeeded. The author is perhaps at his best when wearing an essayist's hat, as he derives valuable insights on the modern legacy of the crusade movement from his travels in the Middle East and interviews with Muslim scholars. As biographer, Reston also devotes a good deal of text to a presentation of his title characters' early lives and careers, theorizes how their personalities and experiences impacted the course of the crusade, and briefly touches on their fates after the campaign. He also describes the Sultan's conquest of the Christian holdings from 1187 to 1189, and next follows the preaching, mobilization, and course of the Third Crusade in roughly chronological fashion from 1189 to 1192. Donning his 'historian's hat,' Reston sets the stage for his drama by providing brief backgrounds on the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and Saladin's unification of Egypt and Syria. might be read as both a popular history of the Third Crusade and as a dual biography of Saladin and Richard the Lionheart. Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade by James Reston Jr. Reviewed by Michael Pedrotty (Department of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade.

Warriors of God by James Reston Jr.