A comprehensive overview of the resurgence of fundamentalist thinking in contemporary American religious and secular life. Crapanzano (Anthropology and Comparative Literature/CUNY; Waiting: The Whites of South Africa, 1985, etc.) offers a critical assessment of increasingly conservative interpretations of both the Bible and our Constitution. The first two-thirds of this study surveys fundamentalist approaches toward religion. Concentrating on the literal word, rather than on its interpretation or application, contends Crapanzano, is ultimately “deadening,” depriving the Bible of its beauty and complexity. Rather than fostering understanding, it silences it and produces a complacency that further widens the gap between believers and the secular. Creating an either-or world, the fundamentalist emphasis on the literal interpretation of the Bible “runs counter to the American emphasis on the individual and his freedom.” Particularly interesting are Crapanzano’s accounts of the role of salvation in the lives of fundamentalists and other evangelicals. Despite their varying experiences and diverse backgrounds, all spoke of the security that a literal interpretation of the Bible offered them. Once they viewed Scripture as a guide to their daily lives, they could more confidently chart those lives. Homosexuality, depression, and abuse were all viewed as practices caused by sin and treatable by biblically based short-term counseling. The final third of this study shifts its focus to the increasingly literal interpretation of the Constitution. Perhaps even more threatening than religious fundamentalism, argues Crapanzano, such a view of the Constitution erodes our fundamental rights. When judges approach the Constitution as though it were a religious document rather than a man-made one, they “give to its words the authority of the Word.” Crapanzano is especially concerned with how judges may decide to interpret individual rights’such as reproductive freedom—that are not mentioned literally in the Constitution. Scholarly, accessible, timely, and significant.
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56584-412-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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