The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels »

THOMAS CAHILL is the author of the best-selling books, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland 's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, and Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.  These books comprise the first three volumes of a prospective seven-volume series entitled "The Hinges of History," in which Cahill recounts formative moments in Western civilization. In "The Hinges of History," Thomas Cahill endeavors to retell the story of the Western World through little-known stories of the great gift-givers, people who contributed immensely to Western, culture and the evolution of Western sensibility, thus revealing how we have become the people we are and why we think and feel the way we do today.

Thomas Cahill is best known, in his books and lectures, for taking on a broad scope of complex history and distilling it into accessible, instructive, and entertaining narrative. His lively, engaging writing animates cultures that existed up to five millennia ago, revealing the lives of his principal characters with refreshing insight and joy. He writes history, not in its usual terms of war and catastrophe, but as "narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance." Unlike all too many history lessons, a Thomas Cahill history book or speech is impossible to forget.

He has taught at Queens College, Fordham University and Seton Hall University, served as the North American education correspondent for the Times of London, and was for many years a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Prior to retiring recently to write full-time, he was director of religious publishing at Doubleday for six years. He and his wife, Susan, also an author, founded the now legendary Cahill & Company Catalogue, much beloved by readers. They divide their time between New York and Rome.

The Gifts of the Jews is the most recent exploration of the historical foundations of Western civilization from Thomas Cahill, author of the bestselling How the Irish Saved Civilization. The second book in "The Hinges of History" series, The Gifts of the Jews extends Cahill's scope back to the dawn of recorded history and across a broader geographical plain. The premise is simple but bold: to show how the religious, moral, philosophical, and political systems developed by the Jews -- descendants and followers of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Saul, and David -- profoundly shaped the world we know today. Concepts as basic as personal freedom and charity derive from their adaptations to and interpretations of their experiences. To anyone with even a basic knowledge of Western history it is clear that Judaism influenced Christianity and Islam. And it is equally clear that these three great religions (or, if you prefer, societies) formed, over centuries, the central tenets of European thought. But to have a historian as skilled at narrative and thematic synthesis as Cahill take a reader back to the beginning of these thoughts and walk through the very first expressions of free will, or a relationship with a singular god greater than the sum of the earth, or an innate responsibility to care for the weak and poor, provides a depth of understanding of the Western tradition more accessible than most scholarship or philosophy permits.

Diane Zaga

Thomas Cahill places the spiritual journey of biblical-era Jewry firmly in a historical context while simultaneously making it come alive in a way that is almost sensory in its immediacy. —Jewish Journal