The Crusades Iron Men and Saints

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company , Inc.. Very Good-. 1930. 1st Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. B&W Illustrations; This book is in Very Good- condition and is lacking a dust jacket. This is a stated First Edition. The spine ends and corners of the book covers have some light bumping and rubbing. The spine has some light fading. There are spots of ground-in dirt and and discoloration to the covers as well, including a two-inch spot of fading / water spotting to the spine of the book. The text pages are clean and bright. There is a previous owner's bookplate (The Jean Witters) on the front pastedown page. "In a Lamb story, honor and loyalty to one's comrades-in-arms were more important than cultural identity, although often his protagonists ended up risking their lives to protect the cultures that had spurned them. Those holding positions of authority are almost universally depicted as being corrupted by their own power or consumed with greed, be they Russian boyars or Buddhist priests, and merchants are almost always shown as placing their own desire for coin above the well-being of their fellow men. Loyalty, wisdom, and religious piety is shown again and again in these stories to lie more securely in the hands of Lamb's common folk. While female characters occasionally played the familiar role of damsel in distress in these stories, Lamb more typically depicted his women as courageous, independent, and more shrewd than their male counterparts. Their motives and true loyalties, though, remained mysterious to Lamb's male characters, and their unknowable nature is frequently the source of plot tension. " (from Wikipedia) .