Scholarly, but accessible
341965
I almost don't want to write anything because I will sound redundant. This book succeeds because it isn't sensational. It is a very objective look at the economics of the protection rackets that emerged in the absence of a Russian state.

The economics of stationary and roving bandits are essential to understanding what has taken place in Russia over the past 15 years. If the topic is dry to you, this is not the author's fault. He presents the topic in a very concise manner. The first three chapters of Mancur Olson's "Power and Prosperity" presents a more in-depth look at the topic- one some might find more engaging than this.

The author brings together relevant theories from sociology and economics and at only 191 pages, if you're bored - you've not lost much.
2295918
This commentary is not the best for a verse-by-verse analysis of the text (it's not that long) but Anderson provides an excellent overview of the Book of Job that does a good job of appreciating the unmatched nature of this monumental work. The overview also deals concisely with most of the critical controversies that have arisen. The commentary frankly acknowledges a Christian woldview, but still argues from a standard, scholarly perspective. Anderson writes well, but the writing is at a scholarly level and uses quite a few two-dollar words, so I had to make a few runs to the dictionary (not a bad thing, really). For me, this commentary has enhanced my understanding of the Book of Job as a magnificent literary achievement, while also encouraging my faith. I like it a lot.
4060999
This is very helpful presentation of representative texts designed for the student interested in gathering basic research information about the religion. The information is not presented in an especially interesting way; Boyce's prose introduction to each piece, and the translations themselves, are straightforward but not florid. The project might be improved by a more approachable and energetic translator, though it seems clear that this presentation offers a precision of terms and clarity not easily matched.
1761099
Though first published some 40 years ago, this volume remains useful as a serious, yet accessible overview of Norse mythology. But, as a starting point to those new to the subject, I would recommend The Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley-Holland, which is a wonderfully evocative account of the Northern pantheon.
Davidson's book is a fine overview of the subject from a more scholarly perspective. It is a book of modest scope and the author is conservative in her assertions. At times her diffidence is endearing, at others it is frustrating. Clearly, the book is a product of its time. Overall, it has withstood the test of time and I anticipate it will be used for decades to come.
4173885
I was looking for an up-to-date, well researched biography of the Buddha, and I sort of found it in this book.  I say "sort of" because it wasn't as heavy on the scholarship as I would have liked, though it was enjoyable, generally insightful, and informative.

Blomfield takes his time getting to the Buddha's birth, first drawing a picture for us of the world Gotama grew up in.  He describes the political and economic scenes and gives us a sense of the religious ferment of the time.  I was disappointed though that while Blomfield adopts the more recent scholarship dating the Buddha to c. 484 - 404 BCE, the rational for this new dating is never discussed.

Blomfield mostly adopts a realistic tone in portraying the events of the Buddha's life and upbringing, though inevitably mythical elements intrude.  All in all, I think he does a pretty good job at indicating what sort of person the Buddha was-energetic and sincere, inquisitive, skeptical, a brilliant raconteur, adaptable, charismatic, a genius.  His treatment of Gotama's search for enlightenment draws on recent scholarship (I recognized Alexander Wynne's contributions) but for me his account of the enlightenment falls flat.  I actually got the sense Blomfield doesn't know what he's talking about.  I'm not saying he doesn't know his way around the suttas, just that he doesn't really seem to grasp what the Enlightenment actually entailed or meant.  (This despite the back flap claiming Blomfield has been practicing and/or teaching meditation for thirty years.)

After Gotama became the Buddha, the sequence of events is difficult to nail down, so Blomfield pauses to discuss the teaching.  I thought this the weakest part of the book, for the coverage here is incomplete, and let's face it-I'm very hard to satisfy as regards these matters!  Admittedly though, saying something about the Teaching here is  unavoidable, and Blomfield takes a decent shot at it despite limited space.

Further chapters take up the formation of the Sangha, how the Buddha interacted with the society around him ("A Holy Man In the World"-an excellent chapter), the Devadatta crisis and then the last years.  By the end I realized just how much had either been left out or only skimmed over, and it occurred to me that if anyone is ever going to do a really thorough, scholarly treatment of the Buddha's life it may well run to a thousand pages (not including a hundred pages of notes).  Personally, I would like to have seen more discussion of the important disciples, as well as something more about the various rival shramana sects (Ajivakas, Jains, etc) who competed with the Buddha.  Blomfield could have said more too about the archaeology of the Buddha's life-e.g., the debate over exactly where Kapilavastu was (generally now thought to be Tilaurakot in Nepal) is a fascinating story in itself.  Anything at all to lift this man's life out of the realm of legend and lost kingdoms and to place it on a solid footing, on the earth, connected to real things we can see and touch, would have been appreciated.  (And I can always dig talk of relics!)

I have one other specific complaint: the use of Sanskrit terms, place and personal names instead of their Pali equivalents.  I really don't understand this practice.  The earliest texts, the only ones that can lay any claim to being truly biographical, are all in Pali.  It is simply logical to defer to those texts.  Using Sanskrit instead bespeaks an ideological prejudice of some sort, I am convinced.  Exactly what that prejudice might be, though, probably differs from one writer to the next.

Don't take my complaints here too seriously though.  This is a worthy book and ought to prove inspirational to many.  While it is not the biography I would have written, I can honestly that what Blomfield has done here both moved and informed me.
2256811
This is an encyclopedic reference book for students of Biblical studies, providing definitions and discussions of many of the terms you may hear or read. Here are some examples of topics, chosen at random:

Eisegesis

The Gospel of Thomas

The Jesus Seminar

The New Hermeneutic

The Synoptic Problem

You get the idea. The book is quite exhaustive now that its reached its fourth edition, and I use it for occasional reference, but I do once in a while feel frustrated by the emphasis of precision in definitions over simple explanations, particularly when the discussion is not accompanied by examples. In other words, it could sometimes be more user-friendly. Never-the-less, there is a lot of good information, presented quite compactly.
1025143
Excellent history; easily accessible to the non-academic.
2152734
I purchased this book after I heard an interview with the author on public radio.  The interview focused on the more controversial conclusions of the author and on his own conversion from devout Fundamentalist to, as he says, "enlightened athiest."  I was curious about the author's research, but concerned that this was a political book.

To my pleasant surprise, what I found was a very scholarly examination of the problems of translation and transcription in the early Christian era, and of the challenges of the method of textual criticism, which the author explains in detail.  The work is respectful and, despite the author's stated conversion to athiesm, very reverent.  Ehrman clearly loves the Bible and the concepts it teaches.

The book reads like "Graduate Text - Light".  It is fast reading, but with careful annotation.

Like others who reviewed this book here, it saddens me that Mr. Ehrman could not hold on to his faith and his scholarship simultaneously.  To those of us raised to think of the Bible as an historical text open to interpretation and misinterpretation, a work of men, finding out that the Bible as we know it contains errors is not earth-shaking.  Anyone who has ever played the childhood game "Telephone" knows that repeated telling of the same tale results in changes, some subtle, some glaring.  But apparently Mr. Ehrman was taught that the Bible as we know it is the Literal Word of God, it cannot at once be Godly and contain errors.
3259297
This work is intellectually accessible to the educated, general reader who is willing to spend the time to read her notes and follow her arguments. She directs her scholarly attention to the charges against, or boasts of, some Freemasons, that the Craft was responsible for the French and American Revolutions. She answers both sides of the controversy with a qualified "yes", hastening to show that it was the already long-standing practice (in every sense) of self-government in masonic lodges that provided a blueprint for the rise of our respective constitutional governments, based on utopian ideas about the perfectability of man and society (at least as goals to strive toward). Any educated Freemason could have told Prof. Jacob that, but it is wonderful to have such distinguished academic testimony of this fact. On the other hand, a careful scrutiny of Benjamin Franklin's travels and contacts (even in Catholic Spain!) that led to foreign support of the Revolution might push her argument more in support of the commonly held belief.
2775762
Some of the best literature, whether divinely inspired or not, has long been lost to the world, too often for political ends. Fortunately, volumes like this one, admirably edited by James H. Charlesworth, replenish much of what was "lost" between the time of the Councils at Jamina and Nicaea.

Whatever one's creed or intentions, if one approaches this volume in earnest, one will find much of interest including, but not limited to, strong, implied historical evidence of egregious tampering by the early Church fathers of certain non-canonical works. A good example in this collection is 1 Enoch, which had been in the canon for centuries before being finally removed and, in the West, abandoned. In other instances, copies were, on Church orders, simply destroyed. Fortunately, complete copies of Enoch (or Henok) were preserved in Ethopic texts. In fact, the version of 1 Enoch presented in this volume (translated by E. Isaac) is largely structured on the Ethiopic texts, though the Aramaic fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls have been consulted along with Greek and Hebrew renditions. Charlesworth has also included many other fine renditions of apocalyptic works, including selections from the Syriac and Slavonian. Even more is to be had in the many non-canonical Testaments presented here, many with apocalyptic passages.

Matters of whether these "rebel" and "outcast" books appeared to be divinely inspired by the various communities that embraced them is a matter of conjecture, though there are strong hints here and there from the various communities of seekers that preserved these texts around the Mediterranean world. Of greater interest to me was the thoroughness with which each non-canonical text has been researched and translated. Charlesworth should be lauded for at least that contribution to our body of collective knowledge about what was being written and by whom at the end of the pre-Christian era and in the early years of the Common Era.

To the truly curious I recommend both volumes, whether for personal enrichment, Bible study, research, or tasting and comparing various translations of non-canonical literature. This is as unbiased a compilation as I have seen in many years. I rank it with the work being done by scholars like Geza Vermes as invaluable to any person seeking a deeper understanding of the great minds on either side of that turbulent millennium (i.e., give or take 300-500 years either way). Of course these writings can lead one's mind to many other insights and down many other paths of inquiry and thought; that is best left for the individual.

Be assured that this scholarly work is exactly that, and is not only highly-informative about the stories, symbols and myths of non-canonical literature that informed the consciousness of the Near East and eventually the Western world, but this volume does so in a highly accessible way. It is easy to read and certainly gives one pause. Savor it.
3370364
I agree with James Horton's intelligent review. This is a useful scholarly book though not the most interesting. For anyone with a strong interest in this particular important aspect of the abortion issue, it is very much worth reading. It is well documented with good notes, a good index, and an extensive bibliography. (from Williams College) Sara Dubow graduated from Williams College in 1991, and received her Ph. D. from Rutgers University in 2003. Before joining the Williams History department faculty in 2007, she taught at the Brearley School, Hunter College High School, and Hunter College. Her research and teaching interests examine the intersections of gender, law, and politics in 20th century U.S. history. Other books on the abortion debate:

mwir-abortiondebate.blogspot.com/
Midwest Independent Research
392470
I appreciate this book for several reasons. First, Yoder is an important figure in 20th-century theology and it is good to see robust engagement with his work. Second, the Stone-Campbell tradition is sometimes known -- not entirely without warrant -- for insularity, and the particular circumstances of this book's genesis speak to what I think is a renewed sense of, well, radical ecumenicity. Third, I appreciate the breadth of engagement and the depth of scholarship represented by the various submissions. They vary somewhat in strength and relevance, but certainly the aggregate offers a multifaceted and fascinating look at this important figure, and is helpful collection of secondary sources. Finally, I enjoy the (hopefully intentional) double entendre of the title -- that the selections are, to some extent, about Yoder's ecumenism, but the simple fact that scholars in the Stone-Campbell movement were willing to engage the work of a Mennonite scholar who taught for part of his career at a high-profile Catholic university also exemplifies that ecumenicity. Kudos to Nugent and the other contributors for a fine work.
3122065
This compilation of many scholarly resources presented in an easily digestible format (with ample illustrations), has many merits, the best of them being that it serves as hub for all of the well-known historical nodes that branch off from it and bracket the subject. I was very pleased for instance to see that one of the resources it leaned heavily on was Professor Genovese's "Roll Jordan Roll." And while I may have been expecting too much to hope that it would have explored a few of the newer topics that have come to light in more recent history -- such as the legacy of the role the lop-sided gender demographics played in producing mulattoes in the slave countries of the New World -- the reader can be confident that here he is getting the best story that the Western academies have been able to come up with -- short of  the more arcane missing aspects.

That story as told here is essentially that slavery has been tolerated (always morally uneasily) by societies since time immemorial -- some more comfortably than others. Most great societies of the past maintained their versions of it. However, this book fails to go into details on how these many versions of slavery differed. There is a whole other story to be told in those missing details.

The strain inflicted upon the Western world came about as an almost organic adjunct to the era of exploration, but did not get started in earnest until it was proven to be immensely profitable with regard to sugar cane in the Caribbean, and cotton in the American South, mostly during the mid-17th Century. The Western justification goes back to Aristotle's suggestion that man is "naturally" divided into rulers and the ruled, to Christian doctrines from St. Paul's Epistle to Philemon, and most of all, from the Christian story of Noah's son Ham.

Thus, as the book points out, the great shame of slavery in the New World, is how easily and how well the countries involved quickly adapted to the contradictions of slavery with their professed ideals of equality and individual freedom. How in fact those like the U.S. so easily squared the circle between their professed ideals at the same time that they came to rely on the brutal institution for their economic survival. It is these glaring contradictions that created a moral fault line that still runs down the center of American culture from the mid-17th Century to the present.

As a matter of historical fact, the book points out that the imperative for African slaves grew directly out of the decimation caused by European borne diseases that they brought to the New World that mostly as an unintended consequence  killed off almost all of both the white and indigenous slaves. Even today, historians cannot quantify either the number or the degree of suffering due to disease -- or due to the brutal trafficking in the Atlantic slave trade..

The one disappointment that I did have with the book is that it did not leave even a hint about the more important legacies of slavery that have reverberated down the centuries, especially within post-slave societies like the U.S., the Caribbean, and Brazil. The moral, economic and cultural legacy of slavery in those societies has been nothing short of shameful and is everywhere transparent even today. The last chapter, "The End of the Great Evil" was especially disappointing, as it was little more than an insult to those victimized cultures that have survived the institution. Even as it correctly admits that it took the U.S, a nation conceived and defined by, and on, the precepts of equality and individual liberty, more than two centuries to eradicate the evil, it ignores the fact that if the truth were ever told, the U.S. did not exactly eradicate slavery so much as it allowed the institution to die a natural death on its own, as a result of it finally losing all of its economic impulse and power.

That said, certainly for youngsters, this is the book for them to cut their teeth on, and to learn about the general history and conceptual contours of slavery. Four stars
1398122
Gertrude Himmelfarb presents an easily digestible if somewhat superficial and partial account of the Enlightenment. Her book is an interesting corrective to the prevailing view of the dominant importance of the French Enlightenment, arguing, convincingly, for the importance of the British and American variants. To this end she gives much greater weight to the Brits in the book and the latter two are given a briefer overview.

So, her book provides a useful introduction for the less expert reader and you will come away much more informed, and this is the book's strength. Another feature is her willingness to look beyond the obvious candidates for inclusion, so that, for instance, William Hogarth is discussed as a contributor to the British Enlightenment. On the other hand, it is useful to be aware of that part of the political spectrum she is coming from. Her hagiographic view of John Wesley, for example, elides important information such as the secessionists who rejected some of his tenets, and her rebuttal of writers such as E P Thomson amounts to little more than saying that she is right and he is wrong. While this may be a little harsh  she is writing an overview after all and cannot be pursuing arguments everywhere they crop up, I did find her at times a little glib and superficial.

Nevertheless, as a salutary reminder of the virtues of the British Enlightenment and a thoughtful if biased examination of the period, this book is well worth reading.
1135092
This book brings a useful perspective to controversies surrounding scientific vs. theistic perspectives on cosmology, biology, chemistry, and evolution. It covers the generally-unacknowledged influence of Hermeticism on the scientific theories of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and more. By revealing the source (or at least a major influence) for much of these early pioneers' thought, it puts their advances into a context that complicates the simplistic distinction of "authoritarian Church teachings vs. scientific enlightenment". It turns out the history is not so black and white.

The authors also deserve credit for making clear the influence of Giordano Bruno on later developments, both as a model for freethinkers up to the current time, and as an example of how the establishment of any era tends to deal with challenges to their illegitimate authority. Today he would probably be disowned by the religious, scientific, and political mainstream, which of course wouldn't make him wrong.
3816940
The review is for the audio CDs. I was looking for a lecture series on Islam, and Professor Nasr, with his wide experience in the west, was a good choice. I learned a considerable amount of new information (I have no expertise on Islam beyond informal self-education) and other areas with some familiarity were refined and expanded by the lectures. Professor Nasr was balanced in his presentation, as it is aimed toward westerners, plus he largely avoids the most contentious, partisan topics of recent years. The lectures were from around 2004, partly motivated by September 2001.

The time frame covers the origin of Islam and Islamic culture, and their rapid spread, the golden age, and then its challenges after the west assumed a more dominant role beginning with the age of exploration. The lectures explain the range of Islamic civilization in its first (approx.) 800 years, with notable advances in science, mathematics, art, education, and so on. Professor Nasr may even sound a little defensive a few times, almost as if he were tired of having to point out what may be largely unknown to westerners. A key topic was multi-cultural tolerance, such as in Spain, where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed with mutual benefit, and in contrast to the Crusades, which were meant to destroy.

The coverage on the decline of Islamic civilization's worldwide influence and advancement was frank, yet hopeful. Quite interesting.

Perhaps some experts might challenge Professor Nasr on his opinions and focus. The material sounded reasonable to me, and I appreciated a scholarly yet accessible presentation.
3118739
This volume is intended to provide an up-to-date replacement for respected concise histories of the Church such as Philip Hughes A Popular History of the Catholic Church (1947). Such an update is warranted due both to developments in the Catholic Church in recent decades, but even more so due to major developments in scholarly research into Church history.

The author, Norman Tanner, is a Jesuit priest and now Professor of Church History at the Gregorian University in Rome. Dr Tanner has done a truly remarkable job in providing a very readable, reliable and engaging history of the 2000 years of the Catholic Church in less than 250 pages of text.

The book is not simply a chronological account of the major events and persons of Catholic history, but provides a much richer story, weaving together the history of the institutional Church with insights into many other elements of the life of Catholics, such as religious practice, popular religion, art, liturgy, religious orders, spirituality and missionary work.

The story is told in five broad chronological chapters, which the author discerns to be natural periods of division in the evolution of the Catholic Church: 1. Pentecost to the Fourth Century, 2. Early Middle Ages (400-1054), 3. Central and Late Middle Ages, 4. Early Modern Catholicism (1500-1800), and 5. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

An example of the recent refinements in the study of the Church history is the description of the period generally referred to as The Counter Reformation by Dr Tanner as Early Modern Catholicism, reflecting new scholarly appreciation that much was happening within the Catholic Church in this period that was not simply a response to the Protestant Reformation.

For anyone who is open to it, the history of the worlds oldest continuous institution is a fascinating story in itself. But Dr Tanner brings a deeper dimension to his account, based on an understanding that for Catholic believers their history is not simply a series of interesting or instructive facts. Rather, due to Catholic belief in the fundamental importance of both Scripture and Tradition, the study of our history provides us with insights into the story of Gods interaction with humanity, the ways the Church has sought to address the difficulties of each age, and how we today may deal with the challenges we face as the Catholic community in our own age.

While the text itself is concise, Dr Tanner also provides an expertly compiled bibliography, offering the reader many avenues to pursue their reading of general Catholic history or the specific topics he covers in each chapter.

Dr Tanner has masterfully created a concise account of a complex story, without simplification and with learning, insight and wisdom.