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Academics don't need a review of this book and might not need to read it. However, if you are a student of history, particularly American History, you should read this. If you understand that we are a political/social experiment to test the ideas of the Reformation, this book will show you where this "City on a hill" came from. It will make many Americans aware of how and why separation of church and state is so central to our system. It will give you some food for thinking about what has happened in the past 300 years. Do you know what a Protestant is? A Roman Catholic? An Anabaptist? Do you have any idea how important Jewish thought was to the Reformation? How did Reformation era thinking inform our political philosophy? Which version of the 10 Commandments is at issue in some schools and government offices? Did you even know that there are at least two "official" versions? This book shows how a million doubts and questions were addressed by some great and courageous thinkers and how the debates changed the world. In a very direct way, ordinary Europeans began to trust thinking outside the box (Church) during the Reformation. The imperative to put ideas into action was part of the revolution in thinking and drove many communities to gather themselves to remake their societies. Many of them came here. Did you ever wonder why so many religious communities came to colonize North America and were so careful not to allow us to become a Theocracy? This book manages to show a huge variety of the different trains of thought, all of which are different, all of which fall under the definition of Reformation. I've studied the history of thoughts and communities MacCulloch characterizes so well here. I am astonished that he dared to write this book and amazed that he pulled it off. I wish I had written it, or that I could have. It is dense, about 700 pages that will seem like 7000 to some people, but I couldn't put it down. I keep wondering what Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli and my immigrant ancestors would say about 2004. I an sure they would be unhappy that we no longer engage in their level of debate but that can change.