Reviews for Transforming Faith The Sacred and Secular in Modern American History

The average rating for Transforming Faith The Sacred and Secular in Modern American History based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-20 00:00:00 Richard Vrhovc This is an extremely unconventional book. So if you wanna get a gist of it, read some reviews first, and then proceed to the chapter. Don't read introduction and postscript until you finished the whole book, otherwise, you'll be utterly confused by the author's own words. Crossley is so far the only historian that discards her pretense of objectivity and ventures into ridiculing the subjects that she wrote about: Qianlong is culturally null (uh?) Manchu is only a political construction. I mean as scholars, it's OK to stating your thesis and you conclusion, but is being cynical necessary at all? I hope she is not as cynical in real life. The part about Qing imperial cult could be expanded. several pages are not enough to explain the evolution of imperial cult in relation to statecraft and diplomacy

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-13 00:00:00 Wayne Bjorndahl Overall I thought this was a pretty good, concise history of what is now modern-day Greece. Sure, it could have used more detail in some places and less in others, but when you are trying to jam the entire history of a country into 300 pages or less, I understand that you have to make some sacrifices and hard decisions about what to include and not include. To speak to some of those decisions, I thought it could have used more content on the cultural aspects of Greece, including how their relationships with the Turks, Romans, Venetians, and Balkan nations throughout their history shaped their worldview beyond just their political situation. I also thought it could have used more discussion of the Greek economy, beyond just saying at various points that it was too dependent on one or two export crops, which seemed a bit simplistic of an assessment. Like I said though, if you're looking for a good overview that can give you a fairly reasonable sense of where Greece has been and how it got to where it is now, at least from a geopolitical perspective, this is a decent book for that purpose.