While the importance of the Bible in the African-American experience is well known, Allen Dwight Callahan provides a much-needed overview in a stimulating and detailed account of African-American encounters with the Bible from the era of slavery to the present. His approach is mostly thematic and ranges chronologically, drawing from a vast range of sources that include history, literature, art, film and music. Callahan describes the many ways in which African-Americans have interpreted the Bible according to their particular circumstances and aspirations, and shaped its message to their needs. He does not sentimentalise African-Americans, places them in context and explores diversity in their response to the Bible. The book begins by discussing how African-Americans first became exposed to the Bible during the early days of transatlantic slavery, and the inspiration it provided for nineteenth-century slave revolts in the American South. While antebellum slaveholders embraced a biblical defence of slavery and sought to imbue that message among their slaves, many African-Americans found hope for the oppressed within the Bible for the oppressed and a belief that God was on their side as a poor, victimised but righteous people. The book's core is provided by chapters which address African American identification with the biblical stories of the Israelites' Babylonian captivity and exodus from Egypt; a belief inspired by Psalm lxviii.31, ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’, that peoples of African heritage would achieve redemption and exaltation; and a close identification by many African-Americans with the figure of Jesus as one who suffered but ultimately triumphed. These themes, Callahan notes and substantiates, ‘appear in different genres and in different periods throughout American history’ (p. 48). The book ends with a personal and impassioned condemnation of the persistence of racism and its effects in the contemporary United States. Much of Callahan's material comes from the ranks of black nationalists, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uses such evidence very well but, except for some attention to Martin Luther King, Jr., has little to say about the Bible's role in inspiring many participants in the southern civil rights movement of the twentieth century. In some ways this omission skews the picture Callahan presents which pays little attention to the biblical ideas of redemption and reconciliation which among others helped to inspire the movement. He notes that African-American slaves did not universally embrace the Bible, but he does not address Eugene D. Genovese's argument in Roll, Jordan, roll: the world the slaves made (1974) that while the Bible provided inspiration for some of the few slave revolts that occurred in the antebellum era, more significantly it blunted the revolutionary potential of many slaves. Callahan also simply accepts organiser Louis Farrakhan's claim that the Million Man March in Washington, DC in 1995 marshalled its target number when estimates suggest a substantially lower, although still impressive, turnout.