The book touches many subjects surrounding the mystical feel about the order. The book is not written to give answer, but to raise some questions. I believe the author did a fine job, to make concrete statements about events which taken place 700 years ago is ludicrous, and he shied away from that.

Burman's book is a fast read and presents a very summary overview of the Order of the Temple. Although Burman does a good job of detailing the Temple's origin and financial workings, insufficient attention and detail is given to the Order's territorial holdings in the Holy Land, their military involvement, rivalry with the Hospital and political dealings with the various Christian rulers. The biggest, unforgivable shortcoming is the absence of any maps in the book. It is unclear to me how you can span approximately 200 years, eight crusades and countless exchanges of castles and territories without including maps of the Holy Land.

This gives a once-over look at the history of the order, from what seems to be a very English point of view (nothing wrong with that) that can get to be dry "history book" reading sometimes. BUT, Mr. Burman has a bundle of contemporary sources, French, Latin, and Arabic sources, that really give this handy little book a surprising amount of depth for being "cursory".

An excellent complement to a study of the Order, or of the Crusades, or of medieval history in general.

"The Templars" doesn't purport to be, and isn't, an exhaustive study of the most intriguing of the Crusader-era military orders. The book is targeted towards the reader who wants a concise overview of the order, without bogging down in discussions of modern-day conspiracy theory or the allegations of witchcraft which eventually doomed the Knights. The book is refreshingly sober in this respect, and, as such, gets a generally good rating from me. Indeed, the Holy Grail is mentioned only in passing, and, if you're looking for fuel for that particular fire, you'll have to look elsewhere.
However, although a chapter was devoted to the part of Templar history which most appealed to me--namely, the Order's development in Western Europe into a massive multinational proto-banking institution--it still left me wanting more explanation in that regard. The reasons behind this phenomenon are examined only cursorily by the book, and are, perhaps, not realistically within the scope of a work this size.
Despite this shortcoming, the author makes effective use of a number of contemporary chroniclers, both Crusader and anti-Crusader, to bolster his thesis--that the Templars' downfall was brought about through a fundamental lack of political "situational awareness" among their leaders that eventually left them vulnerable to Philip the Fair's probably-spurious accusations of heresy. Their undoubted influence among the popes of the 12th and 13th centuries no doubt contributed to their becoming a natural target and tool in Philip's plans to gain control of the papacy (which, indeed, moved to Avignon around the time of the Order's suppression). I think any scholar will find this work an interesting, concise summary.