A critically important, authoritative history of great, immediate relevance.
A superbly concise examination of how American Christianity’s division into a Protestant two-party system parallel to the existing political one came to deeply alter the nation’s recent politics.
Among the preeminent scholars of American intellectual culture, especially of religious thought, Berkeley historian Hollinger, who admits to having “drifted away” from faith, focuses on how religious Christianity, previously only one among many sociocultural factors at play in public as well as private life, attained its current prominent role in politics. The author asks important questions: How did 20th-century American Protestantism break apart into evangelical and ecumenical camps? Why did White evangelicals gain such influence in the nation’s life? What made Donald Trump and the evangelicals take advantage of each other? While harshly condemning such figures as Billy Graham for racial prejudice, anti-intellectualism, and political favoritism, Hollinger never surrenders his scholarly balance. He fully acknowledges how evangelicalism “made it easy to avoid the challenges of an ethnoracially diverse society and a scientifically informed culture.” He sharply criticizes the mainline churches, the “ideological disarray of American ecumenical intellectuals,” and ecumenical Protestants generally for their failure to realize the growing strength of evangelicalism in their “multidecade campaign to achieve more cosmopolitan Protestantism.” Hollinger makes central to his story the roles both of anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic currents within evangelical Protestantism and the emergence of what he calls “Post-Protestants” and those claiming to be “nones”—people without any felt religious affiliation. The author’s only misstep is the relative lack of attention he pays to the growth among evangelicals of anti-Muslim bias since 9/11. In the end, for all his discouraging reflections, Hollinger, betraying some optimism, reminds us that the bitterness of evangelical opposition to recent social and cultural developments reveals how far post-Protestant social and ethical values have spread beyond religion into public life generally.
A critically important, authoritative history of great, immediate relevance.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-23388-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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