A refreshing addition to the historiographical debate about the Great Awakening. Lambert (History/Purdue Univ.) broke new ground in 1994 with his study of George Whitefield (—Pedlar in Divinity,” not reviewed), arguing that the great 18th-century evangelist needed to be understood as a market-savvy self-promoter who shrewdly created a demand for religious tracts and publications. This volume examines the broader religious movement in which Whitefield was a player, paying close attention to some of the less well known revivalists of the day. Essentially, the author argues that Whitefield was not alone in his ability to give the masses what they wanted before they knew they wanted it. The phenomenon known as the Great Awakening, Lambert asserts, was the “invention” of pastors who strung together isolated revivals and claimed a massive intercolonial, even transatlantic, religious renaissance. He provides many compelling examples of this aggrandizement, including a detailed chapter on the origins of the most famous revivalist tract, Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative. A revivalist “script” emerged, Lambert finds, which encouraged a uniformity of conversion and conviction experiences from Manchester, Vt., to Manchester, England. As always, the author pays keen attention to the sweeping changes in 18th-century consumption, which created a demand for religious goods. He also analyzes the rhetoric of the anti-revivalists, who expressed grave concerns about the itinerant nature of revivals (traveling preachers threatened the religious status quo and the local ministers” “bottom line”) and claimed that proponents of the awakening were “puffing” attendance records to fuel public interest. Though the author never actually claims that revivalists were more motivated by money than faith, his arguments frequently teeter on the brink of that conclusion, making the book seem on occasion cynical. Lambert can be criticized for taking his market metaphors too far, but he makes a skillful and original analysis of American religion’s early engagements with the market economy. (5 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-691-04379-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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