Eclectic examples from the ample album of bigotry in American democracy.
A short, discriminating story of melting-pot religion depicting some of the deadly perils of nonconformist faith in the land of the free.
Our Puritan fathers, who sought religious freedom in the New World, were eager to hang professed Quakers as schismatic cultists who entertained Satan. And so it went, as Gottschalk (Religion/Wesleyan Univ.; Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India, 2012, etc.) reminds us. Catholics (especially the Irish) were seen as fostering world domination by obeisance to the pope; in 1834, a convent was burned down in Charlestown. Not much later, members of the Sioux tribe, regular victims of broken treaties, were forbidden to perform their ghost dance. Following their own homegrown faith, Mormons were branded dangerous heretics. In the 20th century, true American Henry Ford excoriated Jews with his own malevolent writings as well as wide dissemination of the notorious hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Throughout American history, Muslims both foreign and domestic have been and continue to be objects of distrust and scorn. Mistaken for followers of Islam, Hindus and Sikhs are often abused. Gottschalk demonstrates the national penchant for prejudice with representative examples over the centuries, when religious differences could be capital offences. That was the case 20 years ago in the apocalyptic massacre of the Branch Davidians. The group was called a cult, as, it seems, nascent religions might be termed. Just what a cult may be is not easy to explain; perhaps the age of the movement is pertinent. (In regard to cults as religions, Gottschalk has little to report about Christian Science or Dianetics.) Against tenacious prejudice, the author makes a scholarly case for tolerance, a virtue we purport to celebrate. “Celebrating the idea of secularism proves far easier,” he writes, “than establishing a society based on it.” If it helps, he offers a bit of instructive history.
Eclectic examples from the ample album of bigotry in American democracy.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-137-27829-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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