Buried Treasures: Finding and Growing the World's Choicest Bulbs

Latvian nurseryman Ruksans illuminates the realm of uncommon, alluring flowering bulbs, while chronicling his uncommon plant-hunting forays throughout what he calls the Soviet Empire. Renowned for these intrepid plant explorations, as well as for his expansive knowledge of breeding and growing bulbous plants, Ruksans offers an entertaining narrative that remains instructive. To begin, Ruksans puts forth a thorough and engaging presentation of cultivating bulbous plants, from the merits of growing bulbs from seeds to the use of tweezers for pollination.

Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Nicholas and Alexandra returns with a sequel to Dreadnought that is imposing in both size and quality, taking the British and German battle fleets through WWI. The fluent narrative begins amid the diplomatic crisis of July 1914 and ends with the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919. Massie makes a coherent if long narrative out of a sequence of events familiar to students of naval history but probably not to many other potential readers. The focus is on the two fleets that confronted each other across the North Sea, their weapons and tactics and their complex and controversial leaders, both military and political.

Crusader Castles

The most famous medieval wars of European expansion, the Crusades, were originally military expeditions sponsored by the papacy for recovery of Christian sites in Palestine. The Crusades also provided land and opportunity for poor and restless knights. Castles were thus built by an alien aristocracy in a hostile environment to provide shelter and to maintain control over the surrounding countryside. After a sketch of the literature and of fortifications before the crusades, Kennedy (history, Univ. of St. Andrews, Scotland) explores the evolution of castle styles, siege techniques, and defensive technologies, relying on the evidence of both Western and Muslim chroniclers and of archaeology.

New Scientist - 27 November 2010

New Scientist is a weekly international science magazine and website covering recent developments in science and technology for a general English-speaking audience. New Scientist has maintained a website since 1996, publishing daily news. As well as covering current events and news from the scientific community, the magazine often features speculative articles, ranging from the technical to the philosophical.

Crusader Castles and Modern Histories

For the last 150 years the historiography of the Crusades has been dominated by nationalist and colonialist discourses in Europe and the Levant. These modern histories have interpreted the Crusades in terms of dichotomous camps, Frankish and Muslim. In this revisionist study, Ronnie Ellenblum presents an interpretation of Crusader historiography that instead defines military and architectural relations between the Franks, local Christians, Muslims and Turks in terms of continuous dialogue and mutual influence.