Crescent Moon Rising

Paul L. Williams is an award-winning journalist with an eye to a sensationalist headline but he is also an adjunct professor of humanities at the University of Scranton, ‘a private Catholic and Jesuit university’. Both these dimensions are evident in Crescent Moon Rising. The book is very easy to read, broken down into small sections and concise chapters, each with a catchy title, which is a relief after reading heavy academic material. Sensationalist aspects include the ‘threat element’ and the gruesome details concerning the violent acts committed by some extreme ‘Muslims’, as well as the descriptions of the boldness and determination of their threat to US norms and their hopes to take over the USA. However, Williams’s command of details, the ‘massive amount of information’ he has collected, and his evident wry sense of humour, e.g. in describing the wilder pretensions of early preachers in the US who started the movement that later became the Nation of Islam, make this book of particular interest as well as entertaining.