A sweeping, penetrating historical narrative.
Equality, humanity, and power were at the heart of America’s second founding.
In Nature’s God, Stewart examined the ideological and theological underpinnings of America’s founding fathers. Now turning to what he calls the nation’s second revolution, the Civil War, he offers a deeply researched history of the philosophical bonds that linked three monumental figures of the time: Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Theodore Parker. The author argues persuasively that the “radical philosophical vision that originated in early modern Europe” fueled both the American Revolution and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 and then tracked back across the Atlantic. Stewart closely examines the role of religion in antebellum America, when a “theology of the propertied classes” emerged as a justification for slavery and for the violent treatment of the enslaved. Douglass called religious slaveholders “the worst.” Piously citing scripture as justification, Confederate states proposed a Christian Republic with “benevolent Christian masters and grateful Christian slaves.” In the North, not immune to racism, none of the major religious denominations “endorsed abolition before the war broke out.” Abolitionists were branded as infidels. The Civil War, then, was more than a conflict over slavery; it pitted self-proclaimed God-fearing white Americans against religious skeptics like Lincoln and nonbelievers like Parker. The war also laid bare the pervasiveness of insidious economic inequality, not only between whites and Blacks, but between white oligarchs, owners of huge cotton plantations, and the middle class and poor whites who made up the rest of the country’s population. Slavery, Stewart asserts, “is best understood as a device through which the propertied exploit the entire nation by mobilizing one part of society to enforce the oppression of another at the expense of both.” After the war, proslavery theology led to a conservative counterrevolution that still permeates Christian nationalism and the religious right.
A sweeping, penetrating historical narrative.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781324003625
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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 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
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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