This book narrates the five-hundred-year history of a notable religious phenomenon of the last forty years: popular Evangelical speculation about the end of the world. Defined by its principal interests – the fate of Israel, the identity of the AntiChrist, ‘dispensational’ history and anticipation of ‘the rapture’ – this religious mentality is now judged to be part of America's cultural mainstream, following the recurrent popularity of apocalyptic paperbacks since the 1970s. Crawford Gribben is a prolific scholar of this contemporary culture and its early modern antecedents, and this lucid survey in the history of ideas is a further valuable (and expensive) product of a decade's labour in this distinctive plot as old as Christianity. Here Gribben's argument is that eschatological interests are a key indicator of ideological evolution within trans-Atlantic popular Protestant history. This engages with an on-going debate over definitions, continuities and change in ‘Evangelicalism’ since the Reformation. To make his case, Gribben forcibly limits his focus across five centuries: he considers only those individuals, institutions and publications which tick the seminal Bebbington boxes for Evangelical attributes, especially ‘Biblicism’. Millennial traditions based on prophetic inspiration (Münster Anabaptists, Southcottians, Seventh-Day Adventists) are acknowledged to have ‘shared evangelical habits and ideas’, but their position ‘outside the boundaries’ of what Gribben persistently terms ‘the evangelical movement’ is maintained. Such exclusions will be acceptable to some, problematic to others. Gribben has dug competently through the historical strata, identifying the ideological roots and doctrinal tubers leading up to his present-day concern. Yet, at several levels, the effort required to disentangle a recognisably ‘Evangelical’ root from near-identical ideas coloured by an unpalatable association with spiritual inspiration, may ultimately say more about current Evangelical history than the debate that this fine work was intended to inform.