Since 2001 many Protestant evangelicals in the United States have issued shrill warnings about the threat of ‘Islamofascism’, or even of Islam more generally, to the wellbeing of the world. Thomas Kidd, a historian of eighteenth-century evangelicalism, has watched this rhetorical upsurge with concern and has produced a short study of American evangelical engagement with Islam. Kidd's story stretches from the colonial period, in which American Protestants encountered Islam through English literature on the Ottoman threat and through lurid tales of Barbary piracy, to the urgent debates among evangelicals after 9/11 about the relationship between fundamentalist religion and apocalyptic terrorism. Although the political and social contexts of evangelical engagement with Islam changed beyond recognition across this period, Kidd helpfully identifies a number of continuities that defined and limited this engagement. Perhaps the most compelling is the struggle among evangelicals to detach their understanding of Islam from internal squabbles over eschatology and Bible prophecy. Kidd carefully sketches the tension between postmillennial perspectives, which encouraged Protestant missions and emphasised the possibility of a gradual harvesting of souls throughout the Muslim world, and premillennial ideas which folded Islam into an End Times scenario. The obsessive effort to fix Islam in the mise en scène of apocalypse acted as a practical and a conceptual barrier to missionary work in and beyond the Middle East. Kidd argues that, while the competition between these perspectives has a considerable history, in recent decades the premillennialists have made the most noise in evangelical circles. Meanwhile, a broader American fascination with Israel and with radical Islam has given leading evangelicals ready access to political circles and to the mainstream media even as their prophecy interpretations have become more extravagant and Islamophobic. Kidd acknowledges that his book focuses tightly on Protestant evangelicals, enabling him to offer a convincing longitudinal study of this particular group and their venerable fascination with Islam. Unfortunately this focus tends also to isolate evangelicals from the wider story of American engagement with Islam. Given the felicity with which Kidd handles his subjects, one might wish for a broader perspective at some moments. For example, the story of American sympathy for the Greek revolt against the Ottomans in the mid-nineteenth century reaches beyond evangelicals to encompass a wider, middle-class sensibility, and Kidd's remit prevents him from surveying this terrain. There is also very little on the shifting national and international contexts that swept up the world's Muslim populations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that brought Islam to the attention of an American audience: imperialism and anti-colonial struggle in the nineteenth century, decolonisation, non-alignment and atrophying nationalism in the twentieth. But Kidd's book ably captures the bombast and the predicament of American evangelicals as they attempted to reconcile the missionary imperative with a scrambled sense of eschatological geography.