The noted historian George M. Marsden published his magisterial biography, Jonathan Edwards: a life (Yale University Press) to high acclaim in 2003. This Short life, five years later, must not be thought of as an abridgement of the major work. Rather it is a freshly conceived introduction to the great New England theologian that stands on its own as an interpretation of Edwards, his intellectual and cultural background, his life and times, and his achievements and legacy. This portrait shows Edwards in the context of Puritanism, Pietism, emerging evangelicalism, Enlightenment rationalism and the rise of modernity. Blending intellectual history with social science categories, Marsden pictures colonial New England as an ‘ethno-religious immigrant community’ (p. 9). Descriptions of the Great Awakening, relations with Native Americans, slavery, the French and Indian War, millennialism, the American Revolution and Edwards's conflicted relations with his Northampton community, while necessarily concise, are illuminating. Marsden's extended comparison of the ‘materialist and practical’ Benjamin Franklin with the ‘God-centered’ Edwards concludes with the offer of an ‘Edwardsean alternative’ to the shallowness of a culture ‘dazzled by its own [technological] achievements’ (pp. 139–41). A brief bibliographic essay includes not only the key works of academic historians but also books by evangelical writers who see themselves as Edwards's heirs. Appearing in Eerdmans' Library of Religious Biography, the book contains at least 100 fewer pages than other volumes in the series. My only complaint is that Marsden made his Short life too short.