Get In, Losers, We’re Going to Moorish Spain

So, we’ll talk more about this later, but I just wanted to let you know that Louis L’Amour’s The Walking Drum is on sale for Kindle until midnight tonight, and I’d like to beseech you to buy it.

This book completely restructured my brain. I first read it when I was a newly-minted teenager, and it’s why I recited a passage from an ancient text on warfare to the planet Mars every night when it glared red in the black sky.

It’s why I, surrounded by conservative Western xenophobia, could still see Muslim civilization as a remarkable light of learning.

It’s probably responsible for me being so enamored of very old texts.

It filled my head with the rustle of silk, the splashing of fountains, the scent of orange blossoms and parchment.

I learned more about medieval trade networks and scholarship than I think most anyone else in their early teens ever did, and I bloody loved it.

I met Arabic and Moorish scholars, some whose names still crop up regularly and some who are now obscure, but who all carried human endeavor forward.

I met women: scholarly women, political women, valiant women, who showed me ways women could be that my history teachers were busy proclaiming couldn’t have existed in that age.

And I learned of a golden civilization that my Euro-Americentric schools barely mentioned at all, unless they were talking about Crusaders destroying it.

I developed a fine appreciation for Damascus steel and a clever tongue.

And I learned the most valuable phrase in Turkish, one that has seen me through many a difficult time.

All of this and more from an author mostly known for his westerns. A dude whose formal schooling ended at 15. I learned to treasure learning, and that it was not only possible but necessary to never stop, no matter when you left classrooms.

I adore this book, and intended to read it again this year, and share it with you, and now here it is in a new edition. I think it’s time.

Grab yourself a copy, and let’s read together soon.