Pech Souleila

About the Book

The story of the green knight who defended Tyre against the besieging army of Saladin is bequeathed to us as a remarkable feat of chivalrous tradition. Sidi Kafir resuscitates this historical legend by making him the last pagan Viking caught up in the turmoil of the Crusades. As a vagrant adventurer looking for new horizons, Ulysses’s nordic son is on a personal odyssey in search of love and knightly prowess. Its lessons are so relevant today: the ‘clash of civilisations,’ alike the original Crusades, tears asunder the harmony amongst peoples by its sterile, warlike confrontation that knows no issue other than mutual distrust and destruction, instead of convivencia, cooperation and mutual respect. The medieval age saw the rebirth of international trade, as during the Roman age, along the silk and spice routes linking the Orient to the Occident. This trade renaissance is a recurrent theme that now dominates the debate on globalisation. Its origins are examined here with the birth of Italian city republics, which created the monetary system at Venice, then the manufacturing base in Tuscany in the Renaissance age. The pursuit of happiness through growing grapevines, imported from Palestine to Europe in the form of the Chardonnay grape, is a legendary legacy to epicurean man.

About the Author

Falakpema is an international traveller and business executive with multicultural roots. His personal experience has given him a vivid insight into the working mind of those who currently rule the world as harbingers of a new world order that transfers inordinate riches to a new global oligarchy at the expense of the silent majority of middle-class people, the very backbone of democratic society. A new form of feudalism, moving force of global, transnational, financial power-play, makes historic reference to that bygone age appear very relevant to understanding current times.