The whole book, exudes an exclusively white, Eurocentric spirit you can't really blame Chesterton for being a child of his time, but he’s really laying it on thick. And Chesterton's language is – and I’ll try to stay polite – very derogatory and sometimes utterly racist: for example, he constantly uses the words 'rude savages' when talking about Australian aborigines, and the infamous n-word also crops up regularly. His passages about prehistoric man and about the earliest civilizations are completely obsolete according to current insights. But this book is nearly a century old, which is an insurmountable handicap for a work that claims to offer a history of the world. So I'm not going to dispute that Chesterton had a very sharp mind.
Agreed, it clearly contains 'strokes of genius', insights that were cleverly found on the basis of the information available at the time (1925). I don't understand how this book continues to get such high ratings and still is being praised. I really looked forward to reading this, but unfortunately, it was another disappointment. I could follow that somewhat philosophically and theologically (but not in the terms Chesterton uses), but historically this just doesn't make sense. Obviously, this is an extremely polemical work, with a single goal: namely jamming it down our throat that with the introduction of Christianity world history has taken a fundamentally different path. And then there’s his horrible, pedantic style, with a constant ridicule of dissenting opinions, especially those based on scientific research (which, by the way, immediately prompted him to make a slight adjustment in an appendix).
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