I just finished How the Irish Saved Civilization.
I am a bit undecided on what I think. Cahill is a marvelous writer but he is a bit clever and flowery with his prose and the ideas he presents are lenghty, sophisticated and complex. You have to pay attention to catch every thing.
The book tells the story of how, when the Roman Empire fell and so the "darkness" fell upon medieval europoe, it was the recently converted Irish who preserved literacy and Roman classics and then disseminated them again to the larger continent/
We still would have had Greek literature and the NT as they were preserved in the East and small Jewish settlements would have preserved the OT but without the Irish, the whole of Roman literature and learning would have been lost.
It is an amazing and illuminating story:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...411233?v=glance