I've read this twice now, and I continue to think this is a vastly overrated book. Pieces of it are beautiful and rather brilliant, but only slight pieces. There's the argument about not dismissing ideas simply because they fell out of fashion - were they actually disproved? The answer is, yes, and the book falls short because the author's intelligence was strangled by his Euro-centric, racist, sexist beliefs. He is entirely blind to the crimes of Western Culture, and he seems to have sincerely believed that yes, perhaps the Conquistadors weren't so great, but the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, so it's wonderful that all the indigenous people were wiped out to make way for the West. Rome is turned into the center of all things glorious, and after his passionate attacks on certain academics for basing enormous theories on shaky evidence, it's a great act of hypocrisy to deduce the feelings of every Roman from pretty much nothing.

I'm also pretty offended by any book that talks about how right and true Christianity is and how the whole world was "tired" and bound to come around - without really talking about anything that Jesus actually preached. He's far more fascinated with dogma and propping up creeds than in reading the gospels. Argh. It's frustrating, because some of Chesterton's other writings truly are insightful and full of his much-lauded (un)common-sense. Unfortunately, I think it's a big mistake to tout this book as a brilliant apologetic. I seem to have the strange idea that an apologetic shouldn't mean excusing (and glorifying) the last 500 years of Western exploitation of the people and lands of the planet, and that discussing Christianity shouldn't be an excuse for defending the Old Boys Club. This book is sort of the anti-Tolstoy.