Keith Jenkins has done a reasonable, but not excellent, job in collecting this series of essays, selections, and exchanges on the effect that postmodern thought is (not) having on the academic field of history. Along with a host of excerpts from important thinkers such as Lyotard, Baudrillard, Foucault and the like, he includes academic spats taken from the pages of the journals "Past and Present" and "History and Theory". These are more amusing (or depressing) than informative, in that they merely show how little thought is actually going on in the field of history.Jenkins is himself pretty aware of this, however. His own written contributions to the book almost make it worthwhile. He comments on the exchanges in the academic journals and notes their unsatisfactory nature, and he also provides a quite good introduction in which he details the main problematic and the key issues being (not being?) discussed in history departments.Despite Jenkins' own clarity in his writing and occasional commentary, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the book, since it is clearly written for beginners who will very quickly outgrow it, and it seems to me that those beginners could begin more fruitfully elsewhere - some other introduction to postmodern/post-structuralist thought. History is not really (yet - will it ever be?) the field where cutting edge thinking is going on in this regard. It is characterized more by a reactionary attitude, or a "ueberwintern" strategy -- hoping postmodernism and its theories will just go away and leave good ole empiricism alone. There are precious few exceptions to this general rule (Jenkins himself being one, of course).Also, there are some major omissions (in my opinion), including that of Michel de Certeau, whose influence on historiography and theory in general will prove enormous.