Kenneth Rowlands

This book would have been greatly improved by two things: the attentions of a diligent editor and an index.

While the material is interesting and covers the subject thoroughly, it is poorly presented, with the prose repetitious, flabby and inadequately copy-edited. I found it tiresome to read what were essentially the same points made several times, not always with obvious relevance to their places of occurrence.

I also found it, alas, unprofessionally obsequious to the Roman Catholic Church show more and its theologians.

The lack of index and the poor structuring of the material renders Rowlands' habit of making uselessly vague references to other parts of his text, literally along the lines of "so and so, which we shall come to a little later", all the more annoying. He has evidently been assiduous in collecting and collating his material (three appendices of useful tabular demographic data and an entirely adequate four-page bibliography are supplied), so the lack of even an automatically-generated index mystifies me.

I'm glad that I borrowed this book from my local public library because for all its interest it is too slight and shoddy to make the £18 cover price worth paying.

Summary: a compilation of good data deserving a better historian, writer and editor. show less