In the bestselling Warriors of God and Dogs of God, James Reston, Jr., limned two epochal conflicts between Islam and Christendom. Here he examines the ultimate battle in that centuries-long war, which found Europe at its most vulnerable and Islam on the attack. This drama was propelled by two astonishing young sovereigns: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Turkish sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. Though they represented two colliding worlds, they were remarkably similar. Each was a poet and cultured cosmopolitan; each was the most powerful man on his continent; each was called “Defender of the Faith”; and each faced strident religious rebellion in his domain. Charles was beset by the “heresy” of Martin Luther and his fervid adherents, even while tensions between him and the pope threatened to boil over, and the upstart French king Francis I harried Charles’s realm by land and sea. Suleyman was hardly more comfortable on his throne. He had earned his crown by avoiding the grim Ottoman tradition of royal fratricide. Shiites in the East were fighting off the Sunni Turks’ cruel repression of their “heresy.” The ferocity and skill of Suleyman’s Janissaries had expanded the Ottoman Empire to its greatest extent ever, but these slave soldiers became rebellious when foreign wars did not engage them.

With Europe newly hobbled and the Turks suffused with restless vigor, the stage was set for a drama that unfolded from Hungary to Rhodes and ultimately to Vienna itself, which both sides thought the Turks could win. If that happened, it was generally agreed that Europe would become Muslim as far west as the Rhine.

During these same years, Europe was roiled by constant internal tumult that saw, among other spectacles, the Diet of Worms, the Sack of Rome, and an actual wrestling match between the English and French monarchs in which Henry VIII’s pride was badly hurt. Would—could—this fractious continent be united to repulse a fearsome enemy?

Author of 13 books, three plays, and numerous articles in national magazines. Winner of Prix Italia and the Dupont-Columbia Award for his 1983 90 minute radio documentary on National Public Radio, "Father Cares: the Last of Jonestown." His last four historical works, Galileo: A Life, The Last Apocalypse, and Warriors of God, and Dogs of God have been translated into twelve foreign languages. Warriors of God and Collision at Home Plate have been optioned by Hollywood.

In 1976-1977, Reston was David Frost's Watergate adviser for the famous Frost/Nixon Interviews, seen by 57 million people world-wide. His narrative of that experience will be published in 2007 and entitled The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews. The manuscript was a considerable inspiration to the British playwright, Peter Morgan, in the making of his hit London play, "Frost/Nixon," in which Reston is a major character.

His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Esquire, American Theatre, Playboy, and Rolling Stone.

In recent years he has lectured widely in the United States and overseas on the millennium, the crusades, and the Spanish Inquisition, citing their relevance to modern issues.

He has been a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, a scholar in residence at the Library of Congress, and is currently a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Born in New York in 1941, he was raised in Washington, D.C. and attended the University of North Carolina on a Morehead Scholarship where he earned his B.A. in philosophy. At UNC he was an All South soccer player and after forty two years still holds the single game scoring record for the university. (5 goals against N.C. State, October 18, 1962.) He attended Oxford University for his junior year.

Reston was an assistant to U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Steward Udall, 1964-65. U.S. Army, 1965-68. Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of North Carolina, 1971-81. Newsweek, PBS, and BBC candidate to be the first writer on the NASA space shuttle.

Married, with three children. Lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.