Sehat provides food for thought in a sometimes acidic tone, as he unmasks and attacks the moral establishments across...
In this weighty text spanning all of American history, Sehat (History/Georgia State Univ.) argues that despite an overarching narrative of religious freedom, the United States has never truly practiced freedom of religion, rightly understood.
Instead, a moral establishment, marked by Protestantism, has continually attempted to squash dissent and the voice of other faiths. For the most part, it has been quite successful. The author points to early court cases, such as those on blasphemy, to suggest that even in the first years following the ratification of the Constitution, Christian viewpoints stood as de facto law. The abolitionist and suffragist movements both posed unique challenges for the moral establishment, which Sehat defines as “the creation of an active religious minority who believed that God had established moral norms, and that it was incumbent upon them to enforce those norms through law.” As the slavery question was settled, the establishment began to practice a moral superiority over freed blacks, while continuing to fight women’s rights. Into this late-19th-century setting entered two other challenges, Catholicism and Mormonism, which sought religious freedom and parity yet were continually denied it. The American narrative throughout these eras, and into the 20th century, spoke of religious liberty, yet Sehat argues that this concept was mere fancy. The reality was far more complex and volatile. “Protestants wanted a connection between religion and the state,” writes the author, “that relied on both a common nonsectarian Christianity and an institutional separation between church and state while still protecting absolute religious freedom. This was an impossible position.” The author argues that in order to move ahead as a society marked by true freedom of religion, it is imperative to recognize that such freedom has not actually existed in the history of American culture and law.
Sehat provides food for thought in a sometimes acidic tone, as he unmasks and attacks the moral establishments across American history.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-19-538876-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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