Tim Larsen has a keen eye for a good topic, and in Crisis of doubt he has found his best yet. Through a series of case studies his book explores the phenomenon of reconversion among plebeian doubters and atheists in the mid-nineteenth century. His line-up of witnesses is impressive not least in the fact that they are drawn from among the star lecturers and polemicists of the secularist movement: William Hone, Frederick Rowland Young, Thomas Cooper, John Henry Gordon, Joseph Barker, John Bagnall Bebbington and George Sexton; moreover in a useful and pregnant appendix he provides thumbnail biographies of a further twenty-nine individuals whose life narratives at least deserve further exploration in relation to the theme (among them such secularist luminaries as Annie Besant and Richard Carlile). The reconversions that he charts are not news: what is, is an approach which treats them as deserving the same attention as the crises of faith which brought his subjects into secularism in the first place. Larsen makes short shrift of existing accounts, accepting at face value contemporary secularist accusations that such conversions were at best the consequence of senility, stupidity or deathbed cowardice, at worst of a cynical financial calculation. Instead, he charts reconversion narratives whose dynamics closely echo narratives of the loss of faith familiar from the work of Susan Budd and others: close examination of both Bible (particularly the New Testament accounts of Christ) and other evidences; a concern that the intellectual position which was to be abandoned supported either an inadequate morality or could not sustain morality at all (a perception heightened for several reconverts by the activities of Charles Bradlaugh); and the voracious and confident reading characteristic of the autodidact. A striking difference, however, emerges in the importance of the biblical Jesus in frequently driving reconverts back beyond Unitarianism to adopt a fully Trinitarian position, in part because the apparent extravagance of his reported claims to be the son of God, which had once appeared to many evidence of the superstitious aspect of Christianity, could not be reconciled with a picture of Jesus as simply a good (and therefore honest) man. Given the timing of many reconversions, it is a shame that Larsen does not attempt to relate this aspect of his findings to the shifts towards incarnationalism others have identified in mid-century theology. Much of the fun of Larsen's extremely readable work lies in his combative exploration of the neglect such reconversions have suffered in previous studies, although he is careful not to make exaggerated claims of his own. He keeps his bludgeon close to his rapier, and readers may occasionally feel that he has selected the wrong instrument for the attack. But in this characteristic, as in the way his text so closely mimicks the organisation of studies asserting the wider significance of plebeian doubt, there is a pleasing echo of the similarly robust publications produced by the protagonists on both sides of the debate between plebeian doubters and reconverts that Larsen has sympathetically and even-handedly reconstructed from his sources.