A comprehensive account of Christianity’s varied history.
An amateur historian tells of questioning his Christian faith in this exploration of the religion’s history.
Since his days as a Boy Scout, where he earned the “God and Country Award,”Paul found that his church discouraged conversations that questioned Christianity’s positive role in world history or entertained skepticism regarding the fundamentals of Protestantism. He found it difficult to reconcile the teachings of Jesus with his growing realization that “Christians can be horrible people.” In this debut book, he offers a lengthy and nuanced history of Christianity featuring events and details that are well known to historians but are often glossed over by Christians of various denominations. The 21 chapters each represent 100 years of Christian history from the first century through the 21st. Each chapter is essentially an annotated timeline that walks readers through a year-by-year survey of major occurrences, thinkers, and developments. While emphasizing that “the story of European Christianity is in many ways the story of world Christianity,” due to relentless colonialism, the book also does an admirable job of reminding Western readers of the robust origins of Christianity in the Middle East and Africa. Though many chapters are straightforward and encyclopedic in their writing style, the book’s introductory and concluding material make clear its underlying belief that an unbiased history calls into question core arguments of evangelical and conservative Christianity, including the notion that the United States is a “Christian nation.” A self-described “average man” without formal training in history or theology, Paul writes in a style effectively geared to evangelical laypeople who, like him, are uncomfortable with what they see as their church’s pat answers to difficult questions. At more than 700 pages in length, the book would have benefited from more concision, but it will nevertheless provide evangelical and traditionalist Christians with an historical overview that explores its subject matter in a meaningful way.
A comprehensive account of Christianity’s varied history.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985730906
Page Count: 738
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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