Hans Hillerbrand has a vast amount of experience teaching an introductory course on the history of Christianity and this book reflects that experience. The author is clearly an excellent teacher and he communicates in an interesting and clear fashion, but, in his effort to cover a vast subject in relatively few pages he is sometimes guilty of oversimplification and, as might be expected, the book reflects the author's prejudices in his selection of topics. Consequently, some areas are well covered and other important developments in the history of Christianity are neglected. Hillerbrand is a recognised scholar who has published extensively on the subject of the continental Reformation and his coverage of that period is excellent as is his extended discussion of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Pietistic movement in Germany and the Wesleyan revival in England. However, his discussion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very sketchy. He devotes a good deal of space to the rise of liberal Christianity including an excellent section on Schleiermacher. He also discusses in some detail the effort by the papacy to combat liberalism in the Roman Catholic Church, but he neglects to cover important events in England. For example, he never mentions the Oxford Movement or the Evangelical movement in the Church of England. Although Hillerbrand includes a useful discussion of the ‘gap between ideals and practice’ in one of his appendices where he rightly comments on the way in which the high ideals of Christianity were often violated in practice, he fails to point out the many ways in which Christians sought to correct the evils in society including the fight against slavery and the work of Lord Shaftesbury as well as others who sought to reform the worst abuses of the Industrial Revolution. The book includes a useful discussion of Christianity in America, but once again the author's selection of topics might be questioned. For example he devotes seven pages to discussing ‘new churches’ which affected a minority of the American population and only two and a half pages to revivals which have been a major aspect of American Christianity from the eighteenth century to the present. Although he includes a very useful discussion of African-American Christianity he surprisingly does not mention the abolitionist movement which played such a major role in American Christianity in the pre civil war period. The book concludes with five appendices that deal with a number of topics including a discussion of theological currents in the twenty-first century and an analysis of possible future trends in the history of Christianity. The book could serve as a useful text in a one-semester survey course in the history of Christianity as it also includes a helpful chronology of major events, a short bibliography, a glossary of terms and a collection of selections from source materials.