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CHRISTIAN REALISM AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS

Any book which comes from the pen of Reinhold Niebuhr is important. For the dynamic professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York, is not only recognized as one of America's leading theologians, but is being blocked looked to increasingly by the laity to provide a clear and incisive intellectual base for the consideration of the confused issues of our day. Many of his admirers have been hoping that he would some day produce a book which would clearly show the implications of his philosophy. This volume of essays approaches it, particularly as far as political and international issues are concerned. Even so, those who will expect to find a pat formula for the Christian solution to our problems will be disappointed. For Niebuhr ors nostrums, whether they be the utopian dreams of liberals, the status quo of conservatives, the Marxist doctrine of the communists, or the proposal for a World Government. His "realism" consists in realizing that every issue is confused, that no human proposal or program is all black or all white and that it is only as we approach each problem in the humble acknowledgment of our own sinful pride and irradicable lust for power that we have any hope of making of ourselves channels for the redemptive grace of God. Not easy reading. Many of its passages will have to be reread many times, but it will be worth it. The titles of the essays give some indication of the profundity and practicality of Niebuhr's thinking: "The Presuppositions of Faith and the Empirical Method in the Achievment of Realism", "Augustine's Political Realism", "The Foreign Policy of American Conservatism and Liberalism", "Democracy, Secularism and Christianity", "Why is Communism So Evil?", "Coherence, Incoherence and Christian Faith", "Love and Law in Protestantism and Catholicism", "The Illusion of World Government", "The Christian Witness in the Social and National Order", "The Anomaly of European Socialism", "Ideology and the Scientific Method". A book to be featured.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1953

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1953

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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