Elisabeth Hurth has written a thoughtful and succinct study of Transcendentalism and its interaction with early nineteenth-century European atheist thinkers. Hurth chooses to focus in particular on the contribution German philosophers and theologians made to American Transcendentalists. She contends ‘that atheism was part of the discursive and religious context from which American Transcendentalism emerged’ (p. 1). Hurth begins by demonstrating how Harvard graduates who encountered higher biblical critics such as Johann G. Eichorn at Gottingen University exercised a palpable influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and others. Yet, despite the skeptical approach promoted by Eichorn and other German scholars, even more free-thinking Unitarians tended not to ‘question the historical veracity of the Jesus tradition and firmly relied on the “uses” of Jesus as the “perfect man”’ (p. 47). Indeed, the reception of David F. Strauss's controversial Leben Jesu among New England intellectuals confirms how much Transcendentalists and more orthodox Unitarians actually had in common. Both groups continued to accept the overall historicity of the Gospel accounts. Similarly, Ludwig Feuerbach's interpretation of God as the fashioned product of human needs and desires was studied and debated by Unitarians of various stripes but was not embraced uncritically. ‘Even disciples of newness and later Transcendentalists like Frothingham remained convinced that religious belief expressed something true about the nature of reality, and were therefore less radical than they are often construed to be’ (p. 101). So also Theodore Parker firmly rejected the proposition that religion was merely a human projection. While George Ripley commended Feuerbach's rejection of a supernatural basis for religion, he too criticised the German for his excessively dogmatic atheism. Finally, Hurth argues that Emerson's ‘aversion to unbelief found confirmation in the simple, devout mystic [Jakob] Böhme’ (p. 153). But Emerson's encounter with Böhme's thought was not uncritical either; Emerson rejected its thoroughly theological foundation and, as he grew older, ‘he became more concerned with the elevation of the self than with [the sort of] mystical union’ celebrated by Böhme. Many have noted a transition within Emerson's later thought toward a more pessimistic perspective and Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism may have played a key role in this regard. Emerson and other leading Transcendentalists did not (in their rejection of historical Christianity) embrace atheism, but sought rather to build theism on what they viewed as more secure grounds, within the individual soul. Hurth has written a well-researched study that examines difficult ideas in a sensitive and clear way. Though its forthright grappling with abstract concepts is laudable, the book might have benefited from greater attention to the personal and cultural contexts of its main thinkers. None the less, all those interested in antebellum philosophy and religion will certainly benefit from Hurth's fine work.