The Book, Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, by Usama ibn Munquidh. This is an autobiography about his eventful life. At 93, he was the most celebrated poet of his age. The book has a non-linear timeline. In one vignette Usama is a lad on his pony following his father on the hunt. In another, in middle age, he's marching in service to Nur al-Din, one of the great Arab military minds and long-time lord of Damascus. Among his long life, he had great students such as Ibn Asakir, the historian and some other figure lights of the Islamic world and even the great Saladin joined in on his lectures. This book you think would all be about tales of fighting and combat; which in one part of the book that's exactly that, all of his accounts during the Crusades. He was born in his family's castle in North Syria in 1095.
             That same year the First Crusade was called up to retake to the holy land. He died in Damascus in 1188 at the age of ninety-four. His tomb was said to be looking over the city, but it did not last through the centuries, and it is lost. All that remains of this great man in this present time are his works. In his last decades of life, he began to write, and this is only one of the works that he finished. Some consider him a warrior poet and say that he wrote this as an authentic guide for the community to live their lives by, because God is the controller of men and their destinies and no one can defy him.
             This book is a group of memoirs put together mostly into two big parts. The first part puts together all the battles he participated in and great events — things he witnessed under the Shayzar and all the other lords. This book helps out the Western medieval history; this work is important because of its famous descriptions of the Franks. His commentary on Frankish customs and manners, though comical at times, is fascinating. However, unlike his contemporaries, he does not make his account into a 'them and us...