Though the narrative is occasionally as dense as a rain forest, it will be rich and rewarding for the determined explorer.
A philosophically and academically rigorous argument that charts one way to political reconciliation in these divisive times.
At the outset, Gorski (Sociology and Religious Studies/Yale Univ.; The Protestant Ethic Revisited, 2011, etc.) declares that he’s not writing for scholars, but although he generally adheres to that aim, he sometimes crafts thick paragraphs with multiple allusions that might daunt general readers. His work is also organized in a traditional academic format, featuring introductions, conclusions, lists of points and distinctions, and more than 70 pages of endnotes and bibliography. Nonetheless, this is an important work, one that returns us to our national origins, examines the evidence about our founding—and our founders—concerning religion and its interactions with public policy. Gorski dispels any number of hazy historical beliefs, on both sides of the political spectrum, including the notion that the United States is a Christian nation or that we are an entirely secular nation. He spends much time defining, and refining, his terms and categories and includes the work of many philosophers, historians, writers, and political figures to illuminate his points. Some are names quite familiar—e.g., Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Jerry Falwell, and George W. Bush, while others will be principally familiar to academics (Robert Ingersoll and John Rawls). Gorski is frank and unapologetic about his own left-of-center leanings and issues dire warnings about what will happen if we fail to heal our divisions. Unfortunately, most of his suggestions at the end of the book are unlikely to occur—e.g., “make civic holidays into holidays again”—and though he warns about public ignorance, it’s surprising that he does not emphasize more emphatically the absolute necessity of improving our system of public education.
Though the narrative is occasionally as dense as a rain forest, it will be rich and rewarding for the determined explorer.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-14767-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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 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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