Baldwin I of Jerusalem death, thought that "al-Bardawil" had started the First Crusade. Presenting a fictional correspondence between Baldwin and Roger I of Sicily, Al-Athir claimed that Baldwin had initially wanted to conquer Ifriqiya, but Roger, who wanted to secure the territory for himself, talked into him into attacking Jerusalem. Among modern historians, Thomas Asbridge states that Baldwin was one of the commanders of the First Crusade "whose skill, ambition and devotion drove the enterprise, and by turns threatened to rip it apart". Christopher Tyerman emphasises that Baldwin was a talented military commander and a clever politician, who "established a stable kingdom with defined
Where I Was From [...] misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely." "Where I Was From" is also in parts a retrospective on Didion's work, examining how these "confusions" affected books such as "Run, River". Diane Johnson summarizes the apparent hypocrisies of California culture that Didion discusses in the book: "Like all California children, Didion had been fed the old stories of California history, but when she eventually came to think about them, she could see they didn’t 'add up.' The disjunction between myth and reality was too large,