A one-dimensional biography of the firebrand fundamentalist preacher. Hankins (History/Louisiana Coll.) has done readers a service by bringing some attention to J. Frank Norris, a populist Baptist leader active from the the 1920s to the 1950s and often overlooked in histories of modern fundamentalism and in Southern cultural studies. Norris, who once shot and killed an unarmed man in his office (he won acquittal after claiming that he believed the man, angered by Norris's attacks on local politicians, was about to attack him), and who was almost constantly embroiled in controversy, is a colorful, outsized figure, not rendered here with much depth. Hankins offers virtually no information on Norris's private life, a fault which he attributes to a paucity of private documents such as letters and diaries. Norris's family is reduced to exactly one paragraph in the first chapter; his eldest son reappears briefly when he succeeds his father as pastor of Norris's Fort Worth megachurch. Hankins offers an overview of the preacher's career but gives little insight into his possible motivations. The author is clearly most interested in Norris's extensive political activity. Like many fundamentalists, Norris thought he saw the ``anti-Christ'' in many modern guises, and he actively campaigned against such evils as Darwinism, modernism, liquor, Roman Catholicism, organized labor, and communism. Norris's tireless political crusades and his combative style won him thousands of followers in two enormous congregations, his own seminary, a radio ministry, and impressive political clout in Texas and Washington. But his controversial and underhanded personal tactics often got him into trouble. He was once accused of setting fire to his own church to collect the insurance money; his influence ensured his acquittal. This portrayal of the ``Texas Cyclone'' doesn't convincingly penetrate to the eye of the storm.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8131-1985-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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