A smart, endlessly interesting exercise in connecting cultural dots to learn how we got here.
Investigating the roots of Christian women’s culture.
Women have frequently been barred from participating fully in theological and ecclesiastical life, notes religious studies scholar Du Mez. They have not been excluded from American consumer culture, though, which has led to their being “less invested in maintaining theological boundaries.” This consumer culture comes in many forms, from dolls to books, cosmetics, and self-help fads. One form is alluded to in Du Mez’s title: In the early 1900s, an Iowa woman, Bessie Anderson Stanley, won a magazine contest on the theme of success: “The person who achieved success, Stanley wrote, was one who ‘has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.’” All these decades later, Du Mez writes, the online retailer Wayfair has more than 56,000 “Live Laugh Love” items for sale. From Erika Kirk’s sequined pantsuits to tradwife TV shows and home-goods emporia like Utah’s Ballerina Farm, from Aimee Semple McPherson to Phyllis Schlafly and Michelle Bachman, women have Christianized politics, commerce, and culture. One notable player, little known these days, was Henrietta Mears, a Zelig-like character whose disciples over the years included the founders of Young Life and the fundamentalist church that private citizen Ronald Reagan attended. Mears convinced Billy Graham to evangelize and crusaded against homosexuality, feminism, and anything short of worship of the free market. Somewhat amusingly, many of these entrepreneurs plagiarized from one another when marketing an endless series of manuals for Christian wives, most of which demanded submission and providing husbands with gratification on demand: “A wife who failed to satisfy a husband’s sexual needs committed the ‘sin of selfishness,’ and the price would be husbands who were ‘carnal, nasty, and insulting.’” With twists such as Amish fiction, the scrapbooking craze, and entrenched Christian nationalism, all this remains very much with us today.
A smart, endlessly interesting exercise in connecting cultural dots to learn how we got here.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781324090977
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
