Krejci - in a book of less than 200 pages - sets out to cover the whole history of the human predicament from the beginning of history to the post-Cold War end of the twentieth century.

For him there are five basic paradigms along which attitudes towards the 'inevitability' of death have developed. All of these are highly stereotyping and dubious conclusions are immediately drawn from scant data. Mesopotamia's subservience to their deities is deemed to have led to their capacity for innovation. The reasoning behind this is that their gods were so little influenced by human actions that mortals were able to concern themselves with mundane technical problems. In contrast, the thanatocentric Egyptians followed more artistic pursuits in the hope of escaping death. The universal cosmic principle in Egyptian thought (personified by Maat) acts a restraint on the power of their deities. These universal cosmic principles are assumed not to have been dominant elsewhere. In making such an assumption Krejci has intrinsically assumed all models of thought to be essentially static and operating in closed environments. This inability to appreciate the dynamism of religious thought means that he can claim that Orphics were 'outside' of the culture of Greek thought and fail to see that the Olympian deities themselves were in effect 'second generation'. Details such as opposing schools of Greek thought are ignored. His belief that Hesiod and Aeschylus are basically bound by common features justifies the treacherous path that is often taken: that the thinking of Homer was, in essence, the same as that of the Alexandria.

Krejci relies on some very out-of-date material, particularly for details on Sumero-Akkadian culture. S.N. Kramer's book (which first appeared in 1944) was undoubtedly ground-breaking at the time, but it reflects only a fraction (and sometimes even this incorrectly) of what we now know about the religion and social organisation of Mesopotamia. Krejci's interpretation of Gilgamesh is similarly narrow; the eponymous hero being treated as the lesser of Prometheus. It is fair to say that there is Mesopotamian subservience to the deities. And yet, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaughter Ishtar's fiery sky bull. Furthermore, although Gilgamesh is a fool for seeking 'the life he will never find' he does at one point comes close to the secrets of the gods - and is deified himself as an underworld god although he is claimed to be part deity from the start.

The basic tenet of the five paradigms could easily be undermined if the assumption of no pre-existing civilisations before Uruk were to be disproved. It is worth bearing in mind that the Sumerians were neither Semitics nor Indo-Europeans There is some evidence to suggest a connection with the Ubaids of the fifth millennium BCE who were dwelling in the same area but there is no guarantee of this and we are only beginning to get an idea of what Ubaid society might have been like.

The book then sets off on its bizarre course through history taking the five paradigms and demonstrating how they have essentially survived within their respective cultures. The cratocentric tendencies of the Russian and Chinese cultural spheres are claimed to be the root cause of Stalinism and Mao. What then of Hitler?

Islam is seen as the most effective response to the Western challenge. Whilst some of the great Islamic thinkers of the 10-13th centuries such as al-Biruni and Ibn Sina are briefly mentioned, Islam's impact on Christendom via Spain's academic development, alchemy, its preservation of Platonic texts, concepts of space awareness and design, and the influence of Ibn Arabi on critical implementers of cultural change such as Dante are all ignored.

The future of the West is then questioned. At this point Krejci drags in Sorokinian analysis of sensate and ideational epochs. On the one hand we have Graeco-Romano civilisation (which I take to exclude the post-Constantinian Christianised period), the socially-constrained Renaissance of Florence and its imitators across Europe, the empirical science revolution of the Enlightenment and the 'final' late twentieth century of homo hedonicus. On the other is the asceticism of Christianity and the Reformation. The possibility of an ideational revival is raised although it is suggested that the cults of the New Age movement are essentially sensate in nature. The fact that the sensate-ideational dichotomy can often be seen WITHIN beliefs WITHIN chronologies is never considered. There's also no attempt here to take the dichotomy back to the five 'original' cultures. As a result it is not clear, for example, if the neo-Sumerian Renaissance of Ur III (2112 - 2004 BCE) is considered to be essentially sensate or ideational bearing in mind that it is a literary and linguistic revival as well as a period of huge state and economic expansion. For that matter it is not clear whether certain periods of Ur III (such as the reigns of Ur-Nammu and Shulgi) are to be considered different from others (such as the late part of Ibi Sin's reign). To be honest these types of questions raise issues about the whole classification; after all, weren't many of the key Italian Renaissance texts fundamentally ideational in nature themselves?

Krejci considers Rudolf Steiner's theosophy to have been an attempt to break new ground. But there is no attempt to link this sudden burst of religious reconsideration in the first half of the twentieth century with the development of Modernism through, for example, Piet Mondrian, whose contact with anthroposophy was as important as his contact with van Doesburg and van der Leck. In 'End of History' style Krejci sets out to show that the West is moving towards an anthropocentric paradigm of human rights which it AIMS (my capitals) to propagate throughout the world.

If there is one redeeming feature of the book it is that there is some shadow of the Last Man in Krejci's attitude to 'posticity' - "the spirit of the aftermath". That at least might be the chrysalis of a future ideational resurrection.