This series is the only comprehensive narration of Western history written from the orthodox Catholic perspective still in print. How would a historical narrative read if the author began with these first principles: Truth exists; the Incarnation happened? This series is essential reading for those who consider the West worth defending.

An excellent, wonderfully informative work, for the most part. You're probably like I was when I started reading this, and have never heard of Harappa, in which case you'll certainly get some interesting information out of this. Carroll goes distinctly overboard with his rhetorical appraisal of them, but he does a better job than most authors covering the ancient world of giving adequate time and coverage to civilizations other than the Greeks and Romans. This is all the more exceptional because he, of all people, would have had a good excuse for ignoring most of the rest of the world...

The book has three noteworthy weaknesses, though. First, and least severe, Carroll isn't familiar with recent research on Carthage, which suggests that "Moloch" was a ritual (like Demeter's burning away of an infant's mortality in one of the Greek myths) rather than a god, that the Carthaginians (sort of) didn't practice child sacrifice, and that they were industrialists rather than traders; but this is very easily remedied by further reading elsewhere, even though it leads to some grating moments in the book. (Also in fairness to Carroll, this book was written in the early 1980s, and this recent research on Carthage has been _very_ recent -- I'm not sure it existed yet at that time, not even in the form of specialist monographs.)

Second, his chapters on Christ are, and I hate to say this, a flop; he admits that there's little point to retelling the Gospels and Acts, and then he goes and does it, not even adding much analysis of interest; I'd recommend replacing those two chapters with the second half of Chesterton's _The Everlasting Man_.

Third, and perhaps farthest-reaching, he either doesn't know or won't admit that Zoroaster _did_ live around 2000 BC, and the Persians' guess of 600 BC was confusing Zoroaster with Cyrus. The hymns which Zoroaster wrote, the only survivals of his writings to modern times, are written in Old Persian, which, even by Cyrus' day, no one could write and hardly anyone could understand. Zoroastrianism is probably older than Judaism, and had an unmistakable influence on Jewish theology. This is not a difficulty for Catholicism -- Chesterton, in _The Everlasting Man_, describes the best and most accurate religion that one could possibly reach by unaided human reason, and guess what it sounds like an almost exact copy of? -- but it is a problem for Carroll's "fideist" or "triumphalist" style. A style which can get grating in its own right, too... ( )