A fluent, always engaging study of America’s religious traditions.
Comprehensive history of religion and its indelible role in American society.
“Religion is a permanent and important part of our lives—all our lives—whether we want it to be or not,” writes independent scholar Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (2011). In the modern U.S., the religion that is most evident in the public sphere is evangelical Protestantism, “the water that Americans swim in.” This influence, she observes, has its pernicious aspects: its demand, surrounded by an entire political movement, that life begins at conception, and its refusal to render unto Caesar and not get entangled in secular politics. Yet, as it has always been, America is also a land of tremendous religious diversity, albeit diversity that evangelicals have regularly tried to quash. Wilensky-Lanford takes a leisurely tour of the currents of American religious history, from the efforts by the first Spanish conquistadors to impose Catholicism on Indigenous peoples to the establishment of Pilgrim communities in New England (its principals, she writes, rejected the label “Puritan” as pejorative). She also explores the extraordinary splintering of established churches in the “Second Great Awakening” of the early-19th century (“If there was no national religion, that meant there was room for many religions to flourish side by side”), and she chronicles, in more recent times, the importation or creation of outliers, like Krishna Consciousness and Scientology. Interestingly, women, with a few exceptions, were sidelined from all this until the early 1970s, when, for the first time in its history, Harvard “invited a woman to say the Sunday service” and female rabbis were ordained for the first time. The narrative flows smoothly, often returning to the interaction of religion and politics (with those evangelicals, she notes, replacing the cause of segregation with that of abortion—“a stunningly successful move”). What remains, Wilensky-Lanford concludes, is to preserve religious freedom: “Variety, not conformity, is what religion is made of.”
A fluent, always engaging study of America’s religious traditions.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167347
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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