Rating: 
Summary: The Most Anti- Catholic book I have ever read
Review: I had to read this for a 10th grade honors history class. What a disapointment! I already knew most of the facts from 9th grade history, and knew when there were factual errors. What was worse was the anti-Catholic bias woven throughout the entire narrative. As a Catholic I was very offended. Manchester has some strange obsession with weird sexual proclivities. I wonder how he can possibly document any of the party scenes in the Vatican that he so graphically portrays. A waste of time! Save your money for better things in life!
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Time
Review: This book is boring. Not one part was even the least bit interesting. It seemed like everything was just thrown in there and the author didn't care what order anything was in. Just as long as it was written about. To me, that seems very ridiculous. It made the book incredibly hard to understand and follow. I do not recommend this book to anyone. I wouldn't even recommend it to my dog.
Rating: 
Summary: With All the Best Intentions...but...
Review: I respect Mr. Manchester's efforts....He starts out very strong. I was very optimistic with his strong entrance into the era. But it seemed almost like he turned a strong fan on his notes which scattered across the room into utter disorder, and he got very bored when he wasn't talking about Mr. Magellan. I hear it's quite innacurate, and I noticed a great deal of prejudice towards the pagan religions.His erratic writing in certain areas (it seems only when he's bored that he writes this way), he seems almost to be speaking a foreign language.
Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: I was forced to read this very long and very boring book over the summer for my Ap European History class. Normally I love to read nonfiction history, but this book was an exception. Very unorganized, and hard to understand it was very choppy and there was absolutely no flow whatsoever. Mr.Manchester seemed to be a bit obsessed with the corrupt sexual details of the time period and it seems he could find nothing good about the church at all. I don't know what our teacher was thinking when he made us read this book, I wonder if he actually read it.
Rating: 
Summary: This is NOT a book about the Middle Ages
Review: It's a book about us, and how we got to be so complicated and interesting. Manchester reminds us that Europe emerged from the Dark period much the worse for the experience. The science, literature and philisophy of two golden civilizations had been lost -- not just their substance, but the very habits and skills of their practice! All that was left was superstition and xenophobia. Into the void, quite naturally, stepped the Church, which, quite naturally, became brutal and corrupt in its exercise of power. Of course it is true that some great minds still shined through, but that doesn't change the overall truth of the matter.What happened then was a miracle -- Gutenburg, Luther, the Reformation, the Explorers, the Astronomers... Learning reborn! Entire traditions of speculation and experimentation in every field rediscovered, revamped, even improved, against great odds and entrenched opposition. The true gestalt of the West was born, an uneasy and oft-broken truce between the old ways and the new, with the new inexorably, inevitable replacing the old. Replacing superstition with explanation is an exhilerating, even dizzying thing for most of us creatures of the West, and Manchester shows us when it all got rolling. I read a lot of history, and this book stands as one of my ever-favorites. Acadaemia (rhymes with macadamia)struggles with real learning, which is to say, inspiration and insight, that which makes us better for the knowing. This explains the criticisms of this book on grounds of its lack of original research. But for those of you who read history to get a better sense of who you are and how you came to be that way, this is a great place to start!
Rating:
Summary: I threw this book across the room in disgust.
Review: As a writer and avid reader, it is not often that I feel compelled to actually fling a book away from me in disgust. In fact, I can count the instances on one hand. This book has that dubious distinction. It is the work of 100 monkeys in a room full of typewriters. I am also very much into living history, and my husband and I have extensively researched the late medieval period for our persona, specifically Ireland and Britain in the year 1500. I have to agree with previous reviewers that this author is not only factually wrong, his personal opinions have colored this book and created an even darker shade of muck. But the one thing that outraged me the most (and prompted the flinging) was his utter lack of respect for other religions, instead choosing to force his own narrow Christian template on the complex subject of pagan conversions. He has obviously done no research on these native pagan belief systems, the deities they worshipped, or the conversion techniques of the church. Overall, the author's lack of research is instead replaced with opinion, conjecture, and language flashy enough to garner a spot on the bestseller list. A shame that such a worthless use of paper should somehow be lauded in this way and as such seen as an authoritative work on the medieval time period. As someone else stated, I wish I could give this book a negative rating. I hope my words have done this instead. Instead, I highly recommend the series of books by Joseph and Frances Gies on medieval life ("Life in a Medieval Castle," "Life in a Medieval Village," etc.) if you truly want a well-researched and interesting picture of what life was like in that era.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Entertaining, But It Ain't History
Review: Manchester's account of the medieval mind is eminently readable and entertaining, but as he himself notes in his introduction, "this is a slight work, with no pretensions to scholarship". He is at his best when he expounds on the medieval mindset at the eve of the Reformation, the most solid aspect of the book. But his scholarship is weak in spots, and he has a curious flaw: there is a prurient quality to his commentary on the sexual aspects of history, a jarring note in this most WASP-y of writers. Still, he delivers on the title: reflections on the medieval mind. It's not his best effort by a long shot, but as History Lite, it's highly enjoyable reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Good - but not Manchester at his best
Review: William Manchester is one of my favourite historians. His two volumes on Churchill and the biography of MacArthur are excellent. This volume is well below his high standards, and he seems to flounder in trying to produce a narrative to cover a huge spread of history. Unlike the tremendous Glory and the Dream, he cannot weave his narrative magic over such as long period. Manchester always writes well and this is no exception. The critical problem is that he really offers no fresh insight. His descriptions of Magellan's voyage are riveting and he seems to delight in telling every gruesome detail of the middle ages. For all the narrative excellence, he does not get into the mind of an era. Also in some cases, his selection of sources is dubious, particularly his section on the Borgia's is based on some very shaky sources and his conclusions would be hotly contested by many. This book can only be a good and colourful general introduction to the period, but little more.
Rating:
Summary: Read it before
Review: I've been enjoying listening to the unabridged book on tape of "A World Lit Only by Fire". Desiring to know more about the era, I turned to my copy of Will Durand's (Durant?) tome on the history of civilization. Surprisingly, in his volume "The Reformation" I found myself reading almost the exact phrasing found in Manchester's book, same information, same anecdote's. While Manchester does frequently cite Durand, I don't think the citations cover the extent to which Manchester esentially imported Durand into his work. If this were Manchester's solo work, I'd give it five stars..as it is, I don't know how to rate it.
Rating:
Summary: A very good book about a poorly-understood era.
Review: This book provides a very nice summary of "life" in the "Middle Ages," filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of that era, and provided a very succinct explanation of the events, forces, and personalities leading up to the Reformation. William Manchester's writing style makes for very good reading--not too dry, but not for lightweights. I enjoyed learning more about the Middle Ages, and the funny thing is, the most I ever learned about the era from the 15th through 17th centuries was from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," which provides an excellent survey of the leading astronomers of that same era.
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