Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

Really more like 3.5 stars. Armstrong is an excellent writer and starts the book off very strong, but it becomes more of a recounting of important episodes than adding anything new or interesting to the thesis. Still, I appreciated the breadth of the book and the style, so it was well worth the time.

I'm a sucker for sweeping histories and this one is generally excellent, avoiding some of the worst pitfalls of the genre. Lots of interesting history presented with only a thin (if adamant) guiding theory of the history of violence (and religion's role in it). She is occasionally guilty of the sin of defining both everything and nothing as “religious” or “quasi-religious” after working hard to establish the difficulty of defining the term (especially transhistorically). The afterword gives a moving polemical summary of the moral upshot of the book.