This book explores the complicated relationship that Christians have had with the ‘maddening and thrilling document of their faith’ over the last millennium. It is intended to be a ‘broadly-cast’ and ‘appropriately reader-friendly’ generalist work on the subject (p. xiii). In this, it succeeds, for it is a fast-paced, accessible and well-illustrated romp through the history of the Bible's impact on people and people's impact on the Bible. Those seeking a densely footnoted tome on the subject that interacts with historiographical trends will need to look elsewhere. By contrast, readers who want to be challenged in their assumptions about how the Bible has functioned and continues to function as a text and about the history of its remarkable stability and malleability will find reading The Bible and the people to be a satisfying experience.

Lori Ferrell notes that, as a cultural historian, she thinks that ‘books, like people, have biographies’ (p. 3). This is certainly an à propos point to make in a work that has as strong an autobiographical connection to the author's own experiences as this one. Ferrell begins and ends the volume with personal anecdotes of writing the manuscript on weekend retreats to a motel in Twentynine Palms, California, and of her devout Baptist grandmother, who spent her evenings reading a weathered King James Bible with the aid of a Strong's Concordance. Yet, the most pervasive autobiographical component of The Bible and the people is its origins. It developed out of Ferrell's involvement, as guest-curator, with an exhibition on the Christian Bible in 2004 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. This source of inspiration affects the content of the book rather dramatically.

The Bibles with which Ferrell interacts tend to be part of the Huntington's collection. She begins with the oldest Bible there, the eleventh-century Latin Gundulf Bible, and works her way through a variety of more recent examples. Some of these are unique bibliographical treasures, like the fourteenth-century Ellesmere Psalter or the sixty-six-volume Kitto Bible, which includes more than 30,000 tipped-in prints, engravings and drawings and hundreds of extra bible leaves. Others are remarkably commonplace, such as the mass-produced magazine-quality copies of ‘his’ and ‘hers’ teen Bibles marketed in the twenty-first century as Revolve and Refuel.

The Huntington's collection focuses on the English and American literary heritage, and Ferrell's scholarly strengths draw her toward early modern England. These conditions conspire to produce a book that is very much about English and American Bibles. It is not the case that Brits or Americans produced all the works surveyed, but they were behind most of them. Nor were all the Bibles that she examines translations into the English language, but, again, most were. Readers should be aware of these limitations since they are not clearly indicated in the title or on the dust jacket.

This is, then, a study of a very specific set of Bibles and an equally bounded set of peoples. Such constraints may well have been a necessity in a work of this type. For although its brevity, focus and austere scholarly apparatus will limit its usefulness as a purely academic work – if such a thing exists – the format of The Bible and the people allows Ferrell to tell her story of the Bible in a congenial and powerful way that should appeal to a broad audience of scholars, students of western history and religion, and bible readers seeking better to understand the dynamic and fascinating connection that they experience with the text that lies at the heart of the Christian religion.