[.ca] HarperCollins Concise Guide to World Religions: The ... (ISBN 0060621516)

A Historical Guide, Not A Religious One:
This book is very detailed and 'concise'. The two readers who have reviewed it looked at it as a religious book, when really it is a brilliant historical account of the basic religions of the world. And looked at from that perspective, it deserves 5 stars, because you can never detect any biasedness while reading it. You can't tell what religion the writers belong to, which gives this book a distance which is necessary when studying one of the greatest emotional tools of the world: religion.

Far too clinical in approach....:
Rather than a well written and enlightened book about the world's religions, this book is excrutiatingly difficult read. It is more like a graduate student's thesis with references interrupting the flow of every other sentence. I found this book very disappointing in style, organization, and with too much information about religions that don't exist anymore. The content is there, but it is too difficult to dissect..... Find another guide that will help you understand the similarities/diffences in the world's religions. This one doesn't cut it.

But how do these religions effect people's lives?:
The title of this book, "The Harpercollins Concise Guide to World Religions," seems to be a bit of a misnomer. While it is great as a concise historical reference, it says almost nothing about the teachings of each religion. For example, the section on Christianity gives a splended account of the historical devopement of various denominations and factions, but it doesn't tell us what the Ten Commandments are, or what a Christian beileves he or she must do to get to heaven. In other words, religious values and morals are not discussed in this book to any meaningful extent, which dissapointed me quite a bit. Various conceptions of a particular divine being might be described, but we are left to wonder how a believer might apply a particular conception to their daily life. To me, this book seems to "miss the point." The fact that one of the authors lauds the book's successes in its introduction really makes one wonder. Having said that, however, I would like to repeat that this book is valuable as a quick historical reference.