How the Irish Saved Civilization

One of my favorite non-fiction books.

A short book on Irish history which could honestly be shorter and I'd possibly like it a bit more.

The author assumes the reader is familiar with a lot of Irish folkore and spends more time on his commentary than on providing some historical context.
This book is quite Eurocentric, so hard to appreciate it from an outsider's perspective.

This was just... not good. I am a firm believer that history can be and should be interesting and even entertaining — I was totally encapsulated by the title & book description, but the writing itself fell short at every turn. Cahill seemed to zoom in on a few main icons & their writings but failed to integrate them into a legitimate, cohesive narrative of the time period. He transcribed & translated a painful amount of practically meaningless passages that have left me feeling somehow more ignorant about this time period than I was before, and I knew nothing before...

“How the Irish Saved Civilization” tells the story about how a group of Irish monks continued to make copies of Greek and Roman books while the Visigoths and other barbarian groups destroyed many of the existing versions of those same books in continental Europe.

There's some very interesting subject matter here, but Cahill tells it in a folksy, meandering sort of way that makes it hard to take the book seriously. The actual question of the title doesn't show up until over 100 pages in, with the main focus instead being a look at pre-Christian Ireland. Which is stuff I find interesting, but also isn't exactly what I was looking for in this book.