James O'Toole, an accomplished historian of both Boston Catholicism (Militant and triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston) and the larger history of the US Catholic community (Habits of devotion: Catholic religious practice in 20th century America), has produced a masterful narrative in what used to be called ‘history from below.’ As the work's title attests, O'Toole's story-line focuses not upon institutional protocols, ecclesiastical leaders or ecclesial pronouncements – the very stuff of institutional history – but rather on the story of the ‘faithful’, that 98 per cent of the believers without whom, as John Henry Newman once remarked, the Church would look pretty silly. O'Toole thus offers a quite sophisticated historiographical argument about the ‘real’ story of US Catholicism almost invisibly – through colourful vignettes and characters who usually receive only short footnotes or one-line references in other histories. But just below the richly-told stories and often cantankerous characters lurks a quite resolute and revolutionary scholarly agenda: that it is these characters, not the cardinal archbishops, theologians or monastic ‘stars’ like Thomas Merton, who constituted the very stuff of US Catholicism, and who make that story both more interesting and more complicated than ‘things brought over on the Mayflower’. Much as Eamon Duffy has done for the understanding the English Reformation in The stripping of the altars or the Annales School has accomplished in retelling the story of French religion in the early modern period, so O'Toole presents us with a brave new world of Catholics glimpsed ‘from the ground up’ – often untutored in the fine points of theology and uncertain in their transatlantic loyalties, but palpably real and intensely interesting as religious believers. Thus we meet colonial Catholics who defined their religious identity largely without recourse to priests, bishops or even sacraments (‘The priestless Church’, as chapter i is entitled). Likewise, in dramatic contrast to the ultramontanist Church profoundly loyal (and generous) to both the pope and Vatican concerns that has come to define much of American Catholicism, O'Toole deftly portrays an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘enlightened’ brand of spirituality in which the bishop of Rome, the Virgin Mary and the miraculous, make almost no appearance in popular prayer books or devotions (as recounted in chapter ii, ‘The Church in the democratic republic’). This is an important, well-researched and masterfully presented work: students of American Catholicism should order it now.