God's Crucible : Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215

from jlbrownn23

The subject matter is interesting to me, but this was really written like you fear a career academic will write. So many names, facts and details just packed in - they get in the way of any sort of story or flowing narrative. The author could have filled 1000 or more pages with what he forced in ...

from ruinedbyreading

The Enlightenment in Europe is often celebrated as the beginning of intelligent, modern Western thought after the Dark Ages. Yet many fail to realize that the roots of the Enlightenment were in the Islamic empire. God's Crucible sets out to correct these misconceptions and remind people of modern...

from bezoar44

This is a straightforward political history; well-written and even colorful, but hardly magisterial, never mind the jacket blurbs. About three quarters of the book covers the period 570 - 814: the expansion of Islam (to the west), the origins of Carolingian Europe, and the encounters between Musl...

from nemoman

This book summarizes the rise of Islam and its conquering of Spain contrasted against the simultaneous, halting attempts by Christendom to meld the rest of Europe into something other than a bunch of roving barbarians. Europe and Catholicism come off a distant second to Mulim Spain in almost any ...

from jensenmk82

This book is a welcome corrective to the standard Eurocentric account of the Middle Ages. Lewis writes the dense prose of a mandarin historian, with magisterial periods and ornate formulations, but James Reston Jr. was overly harsh when he spoke of "stilted academic prose" in his review in the Wa...