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Papal Legislation on Sacred Music: 95 a.d. to 1977 a.d. By Robert F. Hayburn. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1979. xvi + 619 pp. $18.50.

Peter Falk seeks to meet a real need for a one-volume, nontechnical history of Christianity in Africa. In fifteen packed chapters, he summarizes who did what, when and where from the first century to our time. Each chapter concludes with study questions, and approximately one-fifth of the work consists in footnotes, bibliography and indices. As a Protestant missionary teacher in Zaire, Falk naturally emphasizes Protestant evangelism, especially during the heroic period from the late eighteenth until the early twentieth century. However, he does discuss Roman Catholicism, the postindependent churches and contemporary church life. Despite the author's obvious efforts to be comprehensive, he nonetheless virtually ignores the churches which have developed apart from the modern missionary movement, and he does not give adequate attention to the interdenominational, pentecostal and faith missions. More seriously, the author perpetuates longstanding missionary polemics. For example, he wrongly attributes the transfer of American Presbyterian work from Gabon to Cameroon to French colonial bias against the Protestants (p. 353), and he inaccurately blames the Roman Catholic Church alone for introducing disunity into Ganda missionary outreach (p. 285). Finally, the book is filled with errors of orthography and fact. The errors are largely due to the author's reliance on dated literature and his near total exclusion of works by African and non-English language writers. Thus one must raise the question if such a book can or should be written at all. It is difficult for a single scholar to be conversant with literature related to the whole continent; and it is questionable whether the encyclopedic method of Charles Pelham Groves, Kenneth Scott Latourette and Stephen Neill is now appropriate for writing on the story of African Christianity.