Rogerson, who leads lecture tours through the region, traces the experiences and influences from the Carthaginians of the fifth century BC to the French in the 20th, treating the area bounded by the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Sahara as a single cultural and geographical. He supports the chronological chapters with a chronology, list of rulers, a gazetteer keyed to text references, historical maps, illustrations, and a short list of further reading. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR