13 June 2011

Strangely heavy...

I am a happy camper. I might be breaking my back carrying it, but I'm happy. My copy of Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: the first three thousand years turned up on Friday and I'm loving it. It's not been without it's problems though: the copy arrived from Amazon.com damaged, but Amazon has been amazing and is replacing it free of charge and in the meantime, I get to snuggle down with the damaged copy!

It's a beautiful book. Funny, very interesting, beautifully written, and capturing both the "big story", the metanarrative, and the smaller, more personal stories. He also has a lovely, light, almost wry sense of humour which is very modern and makes it definitely not dry in any way. It's more like reading a novel and it is in no way like reading a textbook - but it is richly erudite. It's got enough referencing to keep the scholars happy but he's hidden it away in the endnotes so you don't have to look at them if you don't want to, and he's stacked it with a lovely selection of colour plates and maps. These are necessarily small, with nothing like the grandeur of the cinematography in his BBC series, but enough to support his points. But if you want to see what he saw, watch the TV programme!

Very inspiring!

Completely recommended!

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