Title: Rambling, peevish, predictable, questionable
Product review: A bizarre mishmash of half-baked non-ideas. Jacobs clearly hates the Romans yet the Dark Ages we commonly refer to refers to the period after their downfall. If they were so bad, shouldn't we be glad that they disappeared? Jacobs relies too much on Diamond and (horror of horrors) Armstrong. In all this, Jacobs demonstrates a surer sign of cultural decline: an irrational disgust with one's own culture and its foundations. I stopped reading seriously after the chapter on education versus credentialing mainly because it only barely touched on the subject. I started skimming after that, then just gave up. As other reviewers note, Dalrymple is a much more interesting and smarter critic---and a far superior stylist.
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