Luiz Schechter says:

I can’t believe this book is actually recommended.

It might look good for those who believe that Christians and Rome encompass all good and everything else is evil. The book implies this belief using smart (but detectable) historic misinformation.

The book couldn’t be farther from providing “…an exceptionally balanced survey of… western civilization, its strengths and weaknesses, and the controversies surrounding it” – as stated in the editorial review. The same review, however, correctly indicates that the book briefly covers only the politic and social environment: there are few economic facts in this book and this is what ultimately renders it useless.

The authors confuse “western civilization” with “christianity” in their minds. The facts covered are not selected using normal causal logic, so the reader finds information scattered, instead of ordered by relevance (economic causes/effects, then politic ones, then social ones). The lack of system and rationality generates confusion between cause and effect, making the book useless for unbiased teaching.

If this was all, it could still be an entertaining and well illustrated history book. Unfortunately it gets worse.

Sentences and chapters are carefully constructed, worded and formatted to provide a mix of religious doctrine and historical facts, leading both teacher and students into a religion (read chritianity) class instead of a history one. The same care is taken to make the book selectively incomplete, so as to hide or disguise anything ugly about the catholic church or christianity, without explicitly stating lies.

A few picks:

- There is almost nothing about the Inquisition and nothing at all about its purposes, uses and crimes.

- There is no mention to the main working tools of all western scientists and their origin: the indo-arabic numerals, algebra, zero and astronomy.

- There is nothing about pagans “lacking an immortal soul”, the creative loophole to the Old Testament commandment that was instrumental to justify the mass slaughter of Native Americans by christian colonizers.

- It states that “sabats are mass gatherings of witches, to where they were believed to go flying”, when Sabat is “the day of rest of Jews and some Christians” (Webster’s). The demonization of Jewish costumes (hygiene, for example) is part of doctrines that justify persecutions.

Don’t buy it.
Rating: 1 / 5

E. Guriel says:

This book was bought for an online class… It’s okay the book has good incite and is very easy to understand. History is not really a section of my interest, but if you like it I would recommend this book.
Rating: 4 / 5

L. W. Rose says:

This book is filled with an immense amount of information. It is well written, and supported with illustrations. This book is exceptional for college education, or if you’re into reading history just for fun, this is it.
Rating: 4 / 5