Review
"it was a profound treat to return, if indirectly, to the Good Book, guided by
Armstrong's all-but incendiary intelligence...Without pulling a punch, she pursues the Bible's creation and influence from earliest antiquity to the present." (
Globe and Mail 20071020)
"Asking
Karen Armstrong to write about the Bible is like asking a tree to grow: it's perfectly natural...The story of the Bible's life that
Armstrong fashions is not a study of the historical formation of sacred canon. Instead, it's a history of styles of reading scripture." (
Publisher's Weekly 20071214)
"
Armstrong analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was collected in one work, and how it became accepted as sacred text...The author ends her account with the insistence that most of the major religious teachers of the past...as well as religious teachers from other faiths insisted that charity and loving-kindness were essential to biblical interpretation...This is a lucid, accessible and timely distillation of 2,000 years of biblical gestation, growth and interpretation." (
Canadian Jewish News 20071206)
"
Armstrong, a world-renowned religious historian, conveys with great, plainspoken lucidity how the texts of the Bible were understood differently in different times according to prevailing historic events. More importantly, she stresses that this was not a self-serving error, this reinterpretation of scripture, but a universally understood practice of making God's Word continuously relevant and immediate in human lives. What we have done in our secular scientific age is to turn biblical narrative into a museum piece." (
Toronto Star 20071118)
"The best writer on religion in our lifetime is
Karen Armstrong, and her latest and slimmest book is as much worth reading as
The History of God, The Battle of God...and everything else she produces with such astonishing regularity. Since the Bible lives in the minds of readers, this biography is a chronological account of how people have read and interpreter the most important literature in monotheism." (
Catholic Register 20071118)
About the Author
Karen Armstrong is the world's most respected writer on religion. Her many best-selling books include
Islam: A Short History;
Buddha; A History of God; and
The Great Transformation as well as two volumes of autobiography,
Through the Narrow Gate and
The Spiral Staircase. She lives in London, England.