Shea, Robert Books

The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple, and Leviathan

Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson

List Price: $12.98 By: MJF Books Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $5.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 253 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Serious Problems but a Great Read 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

People tend to come down hard on this book....meandering plot (to be generous), shifting narrative, style, and its drunken trot through conspiracy theories. All of this is true but I fear the readers who argue this are missing the essential truth....it's one helluva read/trip through the intellectual underground of paranoia.

If the reader could let themself go and allow the narrative carry them along this is a great experience. This isn't what I would call 'serious literature' in the classical sense of the phrase but it is a 'literature' concerned with the dark heart of the human condition in the late 20th century and because of this worthy of our time and consideration.

Don't fight the plot and the book will surrender many delights: tilted perspectives, manificent throw-away lines, almost poetic flights of paranoid fancy, to name just a few moments to be had along its 'yellow brick road'.

I enjoyed the book in the mid'80s and now, twenty years on, am enjoying it again. That's rare. Many books I've returned to after years of absence just haven't stood up. But this one has. Does it have problems? Of course it does, other readers have listed them ad nauseam, but that doesn't take away from this book's central gift...a ripping good story that is occasionally lost in its sheer weight of verbiage and ideological warfare.

Recommended with only a slight negative brought on my its lack of narrative and ideological focus.

Have fun.

Editorial Review:

"The biggest sci-fi cult novel to come along since Dune."--The Village Voice.

The Saracen: Land of the Infidel: Land of the Infidel

Robert Shea

List Price: $4.95 By: Ballantine Books Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $2.77

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

PRETTY GOOD BOOK BASED UPON THE MAMELUKES OF EGYPT 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

The premise of this book is an interesting one. An English child is left an orphan in Palestine and is raised as a Muslim soldier in Egypt. The Mameluke Corps. that is the basis for this book was a real organization of slave soldiers derived from Christian and pagan boys from Russia, Circassia (now in southern Russia), as well as from Asia Minor, Greece, and sometimes Central Asia. These boys were raised as the Jannisaries were in the Ottoman armies. Strictly pious Muslims trained in all the arts of war. The Crusaders had some similar, and sometimes equally rambunctious, military weapon in the Military Orders such as the Templars and Hospitallers. Mostly of Franco-Belgian ancestry and fervent Catholic Christians, the Crusades were quickly forgotten in the Middle East until the return of Europeans in the form of the Israelis (the Ashkenazi) and the French and English administrators with troops derived from their vast domains stretching from Indo-China and North Africa to India and the Americas. This book was well researched and the character of Baybars is a menacing supersoldier, albeit somewhat heroically portrayed since the Mamelukes were ferocious fighters and were the only army to halt the Mongol advance. Some historians argue that this Mongol army that the Mamelukes defeated was not the same as the one Genghis Khan had led, but many in the Islamic world believe that if Egypt had fallen so too would have Islam. This unlikely viewpoint is conveyed in this book as we see things from the point of views of the participants including a French knight, an English-born Mameluke, and the woman they both love/lust. Romantized for effect, the history is interesting and vivid. The brutal military training that Daud has to endure matches closely the theories of many historians as to how the Mamelukes were trained. It's worth a look as something original and will entertain without a doubt.