Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Author of Valkyrie: Women of the Viking World
(Bloomsbury, 2020).
Neil Price’s
The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings is a wide-ranging and engaging account of the Viking Age. Never shirking from the cruelties enacted by the Vikings, Price has a knack for picking up on prosaic details to tell a bold story of a society dramatically different from our own. The Vikings may have been the first Europeans in America but Alan Mikhail’s
God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World makes a persuasive case for the importance of the Ottoman empire for the colonial expansion to the Americas in the 16th century. Sultan Selim was moulded by a formidable mother whose ambitions propelled her son to immense power and her political savvy makes her quite as interesting as her son. On the subject of mothers,