A major reevaluation of American religious history. Finke and Stark (both Sociology/Purdue) rewrite the script by considering churches as ``firms'' competing for members in free-market America, and by unearthing long-buried surveys that provide eye-opening information about why and how different denominations corner the market. The authors begin by puncturing the convention of colonial America as a hotbed of religiosity. In fact, only 18% of colonists were ``churched,'' while today 62% of Americans claim membership in a congregation (in other words, America is an ever-more bullish religious market). In 1776, Congregationalists held sway, but as ossification set in (through elite clergy, large congregations, and liberalization), they were surpassed by Methodists, who offered dynamic itinerant preachers and a down-home teaching that stressed personal conversion. Eventually, the traditionalist Baptists overtook the Methodists. Finke and Stark discern the same pattern throughout the centuries: As a church grows wealthier, larger, and more liberal, it loses its fervor and, in time, its adherents. Roman Catholicism, America's largest denomination, remains a special case because of its international base and hierarchical structure. But here, too, success comes from an ``intense faith with a vivid sense of otherworldliness,'' complemented by home-grown parishes and parochial school systems. The same reasoning leads to the authors' revolutionary conclusion that religious ecumenism is doomed. Growing, vibrant churches, they find, inevitably oppose ecumenism: Witness American Protestantism today, where the National Council of Churches steadily loses influence while the mainstream relocates itself in the fundamentalist Southern congregations. ``The primary feature of our religious history,'' Finke and Stark conclude, is that ``the mainline bodies are always headed for the sideline''—a knockout punch, backed by scholarly dispassion and reams of statistics, sure to raise howls of protest from religious liberals and smug smiles from traditionalists. For both species, essential reading.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-1835-1837-7
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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