Did Custer pray on his day of reckoning? We may never know. But Elvis probably did. A checklist, mostly, of various of the...
Just in time for a resurgent theocracy, a celebration of prayer in American life.
America is a prayerful place, writes former Reagan administration staffer Moore (Business/Georgetown Univ.). Why, the Indians prayed all the time, even if their “conception of a higher power had been formed in isolation of revelations experienced by other civilizations.” It probably did not cheer those prayerful Native Americans to learn, as Moore writes, that Christopher Columbus “was a devout and religious man,” though Moore carefully admits that he had a few shortcomings, a piously murderous streak among them. Moore finds big-tent room for just about everyone in his pages; though students of early American history may wonder at his desire to recruit Ben Franklin into the Christian ranks, and though Thomas Jefferson would not hang his hat in any pietistic pew, Moore is quite right to note that his compatriots have been quick to turn to the heavens to seek justification for their mischief, authority for their various causes and assurance that they would all one day grow rich. Thus Conrad Hilton, the hotelier who, told by his practical-minded mother that “prayer is the best investment you’ll ever make,” preceded staff meetings and prefaced real-estate transactions with a prayer; thus Richard Nixon, who persuaded Henry Kissinger to put knees to carpet with him and ask God why they were about to be cast into darkness, or at least out of the White House; thus the current president, who likes nothing better than to lead a prayer breakfast and who is like most Americans, as Moore holds them to be: tolerant and empathetic, if “wary of those who do not share their religious views.”
Did Custer pray on his day of reckoning? We may never know. But Elvis probably did. A checklist, mostly, of various of the American faithful over the centuries, without much thesis other than that they believed.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50403-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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 Yorker staff 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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