BiblioVault - Books about Knight

Boubacar Boris Diop

Michigan State University Press, 2015

A brilliant tour de force, The Knight and His Shadow tells the tale of Lat-Sukabé’s quest to find his former lover, Khadidja, who writes him to “come before it’s too late.” As Lat-Sukabé recounts his past with Khadidja, reality shapeshifts and takes on a dreamlike quality. He describes how Khadidja is hired by a wealthy stranger to sit before an open door and tell stories into an uncertain darkness, unable to see the person to whom she speaks. Like Lat-Sukabé and Khadidja, the reader feels farther from home with every page, as the world turns and morphs. With those shifts, the symbolic order, the basis of meaning and sanity, begins to tremble. Postmodernist sensibilities meet postcolonial concerns in this lyrical novel from a master of Senegalese literature.

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The Burial Complexes of the Knight and Norton Mounds in Illinois and Michigan

James B. Griffin, Richard E. Flanders and Paul F. Titterington

University of Michigan Press, 1970

In this volume, the authors collect data from various sources on the excavations of two groups of prehistoric burial mounds: the Knight Mound Group in Calhoun County, Illinois, and the Norton Mound Group in Kent County, Michigan. Includes more than 200 b&w maps, illustrations, and photographs.

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A Knight of Another Sort

Prohibition Days and Charlie Birger, Second Edition

Gary DeNeal. Foreword by Jim Ballowe

Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

In 1913 Charlie Birger began his career as a bootlegger, supplying southern Illinois with whiskey and beer. He was charismatic, with an easygoing manner and a cavalier generosity that made him popular. The stuff of legend, he was part monster, part Robin Hood. In the early days, he would emerge from his restaurant/saloon in tiny Ledford in Saline County with a cigar box full of coins and throw handfuls in the air for the children. Echoing the consensus on Birger, an anonymous gang member called him "enigmatic," noting that "he had a wonderful quality, a heart of gold. There in Harrisburg sometimes he'd support twelve or fifteen families, buy coal, groceries. . . . [But] he had cold eyes, a killer's eyes. He would kill you for something somebody else would punch you in the nose for."

Drawing from the colorful cast of the living, the dead, and the soon-to-be-dead—a state shared by many associated with Birger and his enemies, the Shelton gang—DeNeal re-creates Prohibition-era southern Illinois. He depicts the fatal shootout between S. Glenn Young and Ora Thomas, the battle on the Herrin Masonic Temple lawn in which six were slain and the Ku Klux Klan crushed, and the wounding of Williamson County state's attorney Arlie O. Boswell. As the gang wars escalated and the roster of corpses lengthened, the gangsters embraced technology. The Sheltons bombed Birger's roadhouse, Shady Rest, from a single-engine airplane. Both Birger and the Sheltons used armored vehicles to intimidate their enemies, and the chatter of machine gun fire grew common.

The gang wars ended with massive arrests, trials, and convictions of gangsters who once had seemed invincible. Charlie Birger was convicted of the murder of West City mayor Joe Adams and sentenced to death. On April 19, 1928, he stood on the gallows looking down on the large crowd that had come to see him die. "It's a beautiful world," Birger said softly as he prepared to leave it.

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The Knight, the Lady and the Priest

The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France

Georges Duby

University of Chicago Press, 1993

This ambitious study sets out to discover what marriage meant in the daily lives of the nobles of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Through entertaining anecdotes, family dramas, and striking quotations, Duby succeeds in bringing his subjects to life, making us feel as if we understand the motives and conflicts of those who inhabited the distant past.

"It is typical of Duby's modest spirit and his book-long concern with the ancient status of beleaguered wives that he ends his study with a plea: 'We must not forget the women. Much has already been said about them. But how much do we really know?' Not everything, certainly, but far more than we did before the author began these charmingly erudite investigations."—Ken Turan, Time

"It is refreshing to find a historian who is always conscious that we simply do not know what or how people thought 1000 years ago. . . . Duby explains the complicated machinations of the medieval churchman and the paterfamilias in a scholarly but lively style."—Sarah Lawson, New Statesman

"Duby has written an extraordinarily rich book—a panoramic view of medieval marriage and the relations between men and women, full of arresting insights and human detail. . . . It is the work of a master historian at the peak of his powers on a subject of central relevance, compulsive and essential reading."—P. Stafford, British History

Georges Duby (1919-1996) was a member of the Académie française and for many years held the distinguished chair in medieval history at the Collège de France. His books include The Three Orders; The Age of Cathedrals; The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest; Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages; and History Continues, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

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