The commercialization of religion, discussed in a detailed historical survey that is also a critique of American religiosity. When Bruce Barton stated in the 1920's that Christ picked up 12 men from the bottom rungs of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world, he was expressing a particularly American attitude toward religion. Here, Moore (History/Cornell; Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, 1986, etc.) attempts to trace its evolution from Independence to the present day. He believes that its origin lies in the First Amendment's rejection of an established church and the consequent need for religions to seek popular appeal in order to survive. Beginning with the challenge of the theater and the cheap novel in the country's early years, Moore shows how preachers agonized between condemnation of the growing popular culture and the idea that it could be used for religious purposes: the latter approach inevitably won, and religious leaders adapted all too successfully to the demands of the marketplace. The author takes us through such movements as Spiritualism, Mormonism, Chautauqua, the Jubilee singers, and New Age. We learn that Central Park was designed to induce ``orderly and contemplative habits'' among New York's poor and that the graham cracker was part of a health program for spiritual uplift. Moore observes that the preachers had a big problem with the imagination and stipulated that recreation needed to have a serious moral purpose. The religion that emerged was soft on dogma and emphasized feeling good, with revival meetings taking the place of European carnivals or modern rock concerts. Moore writes with sardonic wit as he describes the image of Christ as a Rotarian, and argues that commercialization is simply the American form of involvement with the ``secular''—and that if it strips religion of its prophetic power, at least it spares us the strife of such places as Ireland, Bosnia, and India. Likely to appeal to social historians and cynics everywhere.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508228-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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