Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West

Raymond Ibrahim's narrative history of 1,400 years of war between Christendom and Islam — Yarmouk, Tours, Manzikert, the Crusades, Constantinople, Vienna. Source-based, well-paced, a corrective to the academic line that the Crusades were European aggression. The book that launched the modern popular revival of the subject.