The World on the Last Day

A easily readable, but not terrifically memorable, account of the siege and fall of the city. It seems well researched, but is lacking in footnotes and bibliography.

I really enjoyed this book. The author has a flair that's kind of special for historical writing. Derek Derekson is a pseudonym for David Derek Stacton. There's a wiki on his career, which was cut short by his death from a stroke at age 43. He had a range of writing skills - poetry, novels, history - as well as a maverick point of view on many things, and it shows in his take on the Byzantine Empire. In a review of another of his books, the Bonapartes, Time magazine said "His books are brief and taut. Mostly they resemble themselves, but something similar might have been the result if the Duc de Rochefoucauld had written novels with plots suggested by Jack London..." Sounds about right to me.

1285. The Crescent and the Cross The Fall of Byzantium: May, 1453, by David Dereksen (read 29 Aug 1974) I did not find this to be a good book, but I enjoyed parts of it. It tells of the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, but spends a lot of time on events before that and on some things after it. It is biased and blasphemous, and without footnotes. But it was a good follow-up to Romilly Jenkins' Byzantium: The Imperial Centuries A.D. 610-1071 which told of the glory years of Byzantium and which I read 9 Aug 1974.