Interesting history, inadequate autobiography.
A journalist’s memories and musings on religion in America.
Woodward (The Book of Miracles: The Meaning of the Miracle Stories in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, 2001, etc.), who spent nearly four decades as the editor of Newsweek’s Religion section, looks back on the faith landscape of the United States since his childhood in the 1940s. He comes to his subject matter with a unique background as a broad-based observer of religious trends and practices across a spectrum of American society for several decades. However, as he tries to venture out from pure journalism toward memoir, an otherwise laudable book often feels overly laden with a good-old-days attitude. Woodward begins with a review of society in the postwar years, during which he came of age. As an Ohio Catholic, he saw diversity not in terms of race but in terms of religion. He often risks utilizing his own experience as a norm from which to understand the era. Moving from college at Notre Dame and graduate school in Iowa, he took his first reporting job in Omaha before moving on to Newsweek. Almost accidentally, as a Catholic in the waning days of the Second Vatican Council, he was placed on the religion beat and stayed there throughout his career. This role allowed him to meet fascinating people, ranging from Billy Graham to Hillary Clinton, and to be present for immense cultural sea changes as diverse as the march on Montgomery and the rise of the religious right. Woodward’s Catholic background colors a great deal of his perspectives on religion; Protestantism is always seen as a foreign entity, as is Judaism and other religions. The author also sometimes sounds like a cranky anachronism. From his consistent and jarring use of the term “Negro” to his epilogue, which focuses on the shortcomings of younger generations in today’s America, the aging journalist often seems stuck in the past.
Interesting history, inadequate autobiography.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90739-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Convergent/Crown
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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