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Is this some kind of joke? As a young man, William Manchester served in WWII. He then pursued a career in journalism, spending time overseas. At some point he shifted to an academic career and compiled, probably in part from experience, biographies of Churchill, McArthur, and J. F. Kennedy -- safe territory for a journalist. His list of works include some fiction and essays; we can surmise that first and foremost, he is a writer, not an analyst, and certainly not a researcher. As his "Author's Note" reveals, at the age of 70 during a convalesence, he decided to write a "portrait" of the 16th Century as a backdrop to a study of Magellan. In roughly two years he churned out "AWLOBF," notwithstanding the fact that his background in the 16th Century was no more than "the general familiarity of an educated man." As a result, his efforts to deposit ink on paper yielded a work that has an uncanny resemblance to recently used toilet paper. Anyone should be suspicious of a book that provides firm dates for the death of Arthur and Robin Hood. (Chronology, p. X). Carless mistakes such as misidentifying Grand Duke Ivan III as the first Tsar of Russia (p. 35; Ivan IV (1533-1584) = first Tsar) serve only to shred its credibility. As Manchester himself states, the book is "a slight work with no scholarly pretensions. All the sources are secondary, few are new. I have not mastered recent scholarship on the early sixteenth century." In fact, turning to his "Acknowledgements and Sources," we find that he gives credit above all to the Will Durant's "Story of Civilization" (ca. 1954) and the Encylopaedia Brittanica. In other words, we are blessed with a careless synthesis of dated general compilations, themselves compiled from dated secondary sources. The lack of attribution makes it impossible to discern the basis for Manchester's vast array of brazen assertions. Further, the engrafting of his "portrait of the age" upon the material concerning Magellan yields a singularly disjointed work. It is particularly reprehensible that Manchester unquestioningly accepts scholarship that is invariably two or three generations old. The most prominent theme, repeated ad nauseam, is that someone turned the lights out in Europe in the latter part of the 5th Century and it was only through the sudden and blessed intervention of Humanists who re-discovered the ancients in the 15th century that the world was saved from the "Dark Ages." Yes, he liberally applies that hackneyed and questionable term -- to the entire period. Contradictory evidence such as the writings of Petrarch and Dante are only "lonely execeptions" to the total dearth of anything valuable in the long night that gripped Europe in the rather simple mind of William Manchester. (Augustine, Abelard, Acquinas, Chaucer?) Accordinly, the first 28 pages which purport to summarize the history of the Medieval world should be summarily removed from each copy and thrown away. Even a cursory review of medieval studies since say, 1950, puts the lie to Manchester's basic premise. (For the story of this development in the 20th C., see Cantor's "Inventing the Middle Ages"). For an Emeritus Professor of History at Wesleyan, the lack of effort is astounding. Any old source is a good source. For example, as to Davis' "Life on a Medieval Barony" (1924!!), he says: "Davis was writing about the thirteenth century, but his picture of a medieval community is valid in depicting the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." How Manchester would know is a mystery. What changes the Black Death (mid-14th C.) might have occasioned must have been just too inconvenient. As so many have commented, no salacious detail is missed by the priapic pen of Bill "Horndog" Manchester: "lore [always a reliable source!!] has it that he was coupling with the older woman when he was distracted by the sight of her adolescent daughter laying beside them . . . [the passage gets much more graphic from here]" Dr. Manchester, if he merits that title, has only succeeded in unbuttoning the fabric to expose the withering envy of old age for the sexual potency of youth. Wesleyan should be embarrassed; even casual readers should move on to something more intellectually honest.