A readable synthesis of social and political history with direct relevance to the present.
The culture war is nothing new.
In the post–Civil War era, writes law professor Green, a “freethought” movement swept across the United States. It was never quite coherent, with many strains of dissent advocating such causes as sexual liberation and militant atheism. Green’s account opens in 1887 with a New Jersey activist being hauled to court for blasphemy, “one skirmish in a larger battle pitting the dominant evangelical Protestant establishment against emerging forms of religious heterodoxy.” Leading the establishment’s war was Anthony Comstock, a special agent for the U.S. Post Office Department who prosecuted thousands of Americans for alleged obscenity after mailing what he considered subversive material. Comstock, writes Green, was “a religious fanatic, a delusional, self-appointed agent of God, and a misogynist to boot,” but much of his campaign and a law named for him remains in place today. Green capably traces the origins of the freethought movement and its principal exponents to the New England transcendentalists and the “tradition of eighteenth-century deism,” though by the late-19th century, they were far less genteel. At points, freethought merged with violent anarchism, at other points with feminist rejection of the “Christian ‘ideal’ of marriage and family,” and at every turn it was met with severe opposition from the religious orthodoxy. This conservative front strongly supported Comstock while resisting efforts to weaken the powers of the major denominations. The freethought movement essentially disappeared in the early 20th century, and for various reasons: The Red Scare of the 1920s cowed many leftists into silence, while movement leaders such as Robert Ingersoll found no heirs after their death. But more, Green writes, “many of the causes that freethinkers embraced and believed were inhibited by organized religion—scientific inquiry, evolution, greater artistic and intellectual freedom, and social reform— were gaining ground on their own.”
A readable synthesis of social and political history with direct relevance to the present.Pub Date: April 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780197822265
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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 Yorkerstaff 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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