Heather Sharkey's book is the latest in a series Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. It examines the relatively small American Presbyterian mission in Egypt from 1854, when the first missionaries arrived, to 1967, when their successors packed their bags and left, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War between Israel and surrounding Arab states. Sharkey draws on a wide range of published and archival material to give a detailed account of the mission, its changing circumstances and the evolution of its aims and methods. She distinguishes four periods in its development. Between 1854 and 1882 the Presbyterians, inspired by the idea of universal evangelisation, concentrated upon the Coptic Orthodox, and from a small number of converts set up the Egyptian Evangelical Church. From the time of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 until 1918 the mission enjoyed the protection of the authorities as well as good financial support from its home base. Confident in its role, it attempted to evangelise Muslims. The third stage, from 1918 until 1945, was one of increasing difficulty. Financial support diminished, while hostility from Muslim organisations and government restrictions steadily grew. After 1945 the missionaries worked against the background of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and in the context of growing Egyptianisation. The mission transferred more and more of its property and work to the Egyptian Evangelical Church. Intense anti-American feeling motivated the dissolution of the Missionary Association in 1966, and the departure of the last American missionaries a year later. By then not only had the political and social context of the mission changed: the attitudes of the missionaries had changed too. Their initial hostility to the Coptic Orthodox Church, which they at first considered backward and failing in its responsibility for evangelising Muslims, was gradually modified. The Coptic Church, spurred by the missionaries to self-defence, initiated a series of internal developments which contributed to an impressive revival and its present vigour; and by the time that the mission came to an end, its members had a more positive appreciation of a Church which claimed to have been witnessing to the Gospel for eighteen hundred years before the Americans arrived. The missionaries came to understand that it was no simple matter for a Muslim to become a Christian, and began to engage in dialogue rather than in attempts to convert. The missionaries had thus themselves undergone a certain conversion. But their work had not been fruitless. There survived their departure the American University in Cairo, the Egyptian Evangelical Church and an unquantifiable influence on social attitudes more widespread than the mission's obvious achievements. Sharkey's excellent study of the history of one particular mission brings into sharp focus the transformation of almost all missionary activity in the course of the past hundred and fifty years.