This book is utter rubbish. A short history of such a long period and large, complex region is no doubt a hard thing to write. But the difficulty should be in trying to craft something clear, readable and essentially true despite the extraordinary burdens of compression and necessary exposition. The difficulty shouldn't be in the facts, which a competent undergraduate should have been able to get from reference sources without serious error. But Hopkins (in reality the horror and fantasy author Chelsea Quinn Yarbro), gets facts small and large wrong time and again. I'm in serious doubt if she could pass an undergraduate pop quiz on the Successors of Alexander, Romans vs. Byzantines or the early history of Christianity her accounts are so peculiar and error-filled. (To my mind it's also boring and poorly written, but that's really beside the point.)

A non-specialist can, of course, know and say true things about history, but it comes as no surprise to find that Yarbro didn't finish college, "has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy," writes 3-4 books a year (plus short stories), and made her career writing historical vampire novels. I won't speculate how her general history of the middle east from antiquity to the early modern period got published, but for the sake of the hapless grazers of the remainder table whom it will bore and misinform, it shouldn't have been. ( )

This is an ambitious effort. The book tries to summarize relations between the Muslim world and Western civilization from the very beginning to right now. As an overview of Middle Eastern history, it's a good jumping-off point for further study, but it's not nearly long enough to do it's topic justice. ( )