Comment

God's Crucible

Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215
Jun 04, 2012lvb125 rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Well written, informative and enjoyable reading. I will recommend this book to all; despite two noticable shortcoming: 1) Strange redundencies occur at several points in the book: almost verbatim paragraphs occur within two or three pages (a product of what I suspect to be artifacts of rewrites during the creation process that, for some reason, made it past the editor). This is not a problem, especially because these redundant paragraphs contain important points. It is, however, awkward. 2) The primer provided in the first chapter for the history of the Classical Roman world--an understanding of which is certainly contextually useful, if not essential--is just too truncated. It would have been better, in my opinion, to have left out the poor primer and assumed the prerequisite knowelge in the reader. These are small issues however. The book is good. Go ahead, read it!