A welcome contribution to American religious and political history.
Vigorous study of the early Mormon settlement in Illinois, linking its founding to a rising anti-democratic tradition.
Park (History/Sam Houston State Univ.; American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833, 2018, etc.) joins the history of Mormonism—a term used throughout the book but one that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seems to be distancing itself from—to that of Puritanism as a breakaway political movement whose members “believed the nation had forgotten its true purpose and was in need of a return to divine values.” In the case of the Mormons, that return involved a repudiation of the Constitution in favor of a document called the Council of Fifty, which “rejected America’s democratic system as a failed experiment and sought to replace it with a theocratic kingdom.” Thus the Kingdom of Nauvoo, on the Mississippi River, a place very different from the Utah in which the Mormons eventually took shelter. Persecuted by neighbors and officials for polygamy and sedition, the Mormon residents of Nauvoo—12,000 of them in 1844, by Park’s reckoning—also suffered internal divisions, including a famed disagreement between Mormon founder Joseph Smith and his wife Emma over what she regarded to be widespread sexual impropriety. As a force meant to clean society of its evils, the Mormons attracted plenty of like-minded converts, including a handful of African Americans and Native Americans who were definitively second-class citizens in the new order. Park allows that the Mormons had a point to make and that they were not alone in protesting a democracy that had witnessed much impropriety itself since the days of the Revolution, including “legal precedents based on the flimsiest of judicial decisions and political traditions established in the wake of corrupt electoral bargains.” The author effectively links the Mormon critique to other dissidents, including the states' rights advocates who would lead the secessionist movement and modern-day dissidents who “flagrantly challenge the political and legal system” and reject the nation’s democratic precepts.
A welcome contribution to American religious and political history.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-486-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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