A review by marcymurli
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Karen Armstrong

2.0

The first few chapters were quite interesting and I certainly learned a lot from this book. However, once she gets deep into philosophy, most of which centers on Christian philosophy, the book dragged. It became much less about the history and far more about the idea of god, something that I was not as interest in reading. Plus she seems to have elided pretty important details in the history of monotheism: 1) she barely mentions Zorastrianism, the first monotheism; 2) she does not speak at all about Jewish conversion, which is what really led to the number of Jews around the world; 3) she has almost nothing to say about the forced conversions of all the major three monotheisms she discusses around the world and makes it seem as if it was all rather benign. Her sense of Islam and Christianity is deeply misguided, for example, as there were quite brutal forced conversions here. Also, while she does talk about the Palestinian nakba created by Zionism, she dates its inception to 1920--something that certainly could be considered accurate given how far back Zionist colonialism of Palestine dates. However, that doesn't seem to be what she's doing. She seems to be confusing the Sykes-Picot agreement with the nakba and gets her dates wrong. Finally, she practically salivates over two unsavoury characters, neither of whom seem to me to have much to do with the history of a monotheistic god: David Ben-Gurion (architect of the nakba, although she fails to mention this) and Elie Wiesel. If she had done that earlier in the book, I would not have made the effort to finish it.