With a subtitle like A History of Ultimate Reality, and a somewhat lengthy (although, by Jones’ standards, restrained) page count pushing the nine-hundreds, it’s hard to stifle one’s first impressions: “ambitious!” But the ambition is met by the author’s competence. Jones is no stranger to dense, seemingly convoluted, and historically complicated subject matter; his last major work, Barren Metal, was a dissection of usury both in theory and in practice, cutting a path through the history of medieval Europe all the way up to the last financial crisis. Prior to that, he published a history of revolution that got him effectively blacklisted from polite, respectable society; he learned the hard way that naming your book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, and then writing at length upon the theological identity of contemporary Judaism, is a good way to have figures you considered friends stop returning your calls.