Combining rare narrative skills and historical detail, Johnson (History/Univ. of Utah) and Wilentz (History/Princeton) recreate the fascinating tale of a false prophet and his misguided followers in New York in the 1820s and '30s. The authors reveal the social, economic, racial, and sexual conditions that give rise to apocalyptic cults and their virile, charismatic leaders. A whole series of evangelical cults appeared in the early decades of the 19th century to serve the poor, the emotionally needy, those excluded from the new prosperity, optimism, tolerance, personal freedom, and rational belief of the mercantile classes. Elijah Pierson started the Retrenchment Society to rescue prostitutes but became deranged himself when he was unable to raise his wife from the dead. Robert Matthews, later Matthias, an impoverished carpenter who had beaten and abandoned his wife and children, engaged Pierson's interest and used his resources to start his own Kingdom, a communal patriarchy that advocated ``abundant'' food, naked bathing, wife-swapping, and complete obedience. Fully bearded, dressed in bizarre costumes of ruffles, pantaloons, and a magician's cap, the deranged Matthias ``damned'' wives who worked, men who wore spectacles, and most Christians. Inevitably, his anarchic thinking came in conflict with the law, and although he was suspected of poisoning Pierson and stealing his money, Matthias was convicted only of beating his daughter and jailed for 30 days. The lurid trial dominated the new ``penny'' journalism, generating pamphlets and books alerting Christians against fanaticism. But to the slaves, the improvident, and the laboring classes, Matthias and similar cults offered a refuge and inspiration. A black servant, for instance, had her own revelation in 1843 and was reborn as Sojourner Truth, abolitionist ex-slave. A chilling study in social psychology, this volume explores the dark energies behind leaders such as Jim Jones and David Koresh and the needs they exploit.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-503827-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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
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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