Module 4 Geography – Around the World in 100 years

What do you all think of “Around the World in 100 years”?  I bought it for next year (we’ll be doing Module 4 history/geography) and started reading it.  And a few things concern me.

First, Jean Fritz seems to use inflammatory language when referring to Christians.  Am I the only one to think that? p. 11 – Christianity was a new religion, fighting for survival, and in AD 391 Christians burned the city of Alexandria and its famous libraries….  Christians did not believe in scholarship.

p.17 – Moreover, people in Spain…..felt threatened by people who had a different religion and different customs.  And they resented the fact that Muslims controlled the spice market in the Indies.

p.20 – …Henry might well have followed the unquestioning ideas of his father….He was certainly religious enough……

and, also p. 20 – Christians never forgot that they wanted to make the whole world Christian, so of course they considered any war against the Muslims a Holy War and anyone who led it was a hero.

I don’t want to start a fight or anything!  But my own knowledge of this time period is so sketchy that I’ll be learning right along side my girls.  I want us to learn the truth, however hard it is — or however badly people behaved in the name of Christ.  But the wording Fritz uses seems to me to be a bit inflammatory, or as if she had a bone to pick with Christians.  I would certainly think that an author as often-published as Fritz could come up with a better way to word things.  (We read most all of Fritz’s books dealing with the beginnings of the USA and never found anything so flagrantly combative in those books.)

Am I reading it wrong?

What do you all think?

I think I’ll still use the book, as it combines in one place all the important explorers.  But I’ll definitely be editing and re-wording as I read this out loud.