A sweeping history of the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilities."With passion, Raymond Ibrahim offers an edgy and eye-opening introduction to a millennium of warfare between the Muslim and Christian worlds before the modern age." —Thomas Madden, award-winning author of Istanbul**,** Venice**, and** Concise History of the Cr...

A riveting account of the lives and epic battles of eight Western defenders against violent Islamic jihad that sheds much-needed light on the enduring conflict with radical IslamIn Defenders of the West, the author of Sword and Scimitar follows up with vivid and dramatic profiles of eight extraordinary warriors—some saints, some sinners—who defended the Christian West against Islamic invasions.Discover the real Count Dracula, Spain’s El Ci...

A sweeping history of the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilitiesThe West and Islam—the sword and scimitar—have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad’s order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom.Sword and Scimitar chronicles the decisive battles that arose from this a...

The definitive account of the warrior-monks who stood as Christendom’s shield against centuries of relentless Islamic aggression and a superlative example of Muscular Christianity for an era marred by effete and effeminized forms of the faith.In this magisterial history, Raymond Ibrahim chronicles the long and brutal conflict between Islam and the West through the eyes and lives of Christendom’s original commando forces: the knights of the Temple and Hospital. Thes...

As the podcast studies field continues to gain momentum both within academia and in practice, scholars have been mapping and exploring the podcasting landscape from a variety of perspectives. This edited volume highlights the diverse spaces that podcasts embody and create, amplifying the unique and understudied perspectives and voices of podcasting. Through a multitude of interdisciplinary approaches, contributors explore the various cultural, racial, and identity-based markers undergirdin...

Summarises advances in cultivation practices to close yield gaps, including more efficient irrigation and nutrition techniques;Discusses innovative methods of ‘climate-smart’ cultivation such as integrated crop management and the system of rice intensification (SRI);Reviews the latest research on insect pests, weeds and integrated pest management

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing, ICA3PP 2017, held in Helsinki, Finland, in August 2017.The 25 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 117 submissions. They cover topics such as parallel and distributed architectures; software systems and programming models; distributed and network-based computing; big data and its applications; parallel and distributed algorit...