An informative and occasionally enlightening survey of American messianic movements, but it will likely have limited appeal...
A detailed account of messianic movements in America.
On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 people died at Jonestown, Guyana, a remote settlement of the Peoples Temple cult led by self-styled messiah Jim Jones. This mass murder-suicide, the largest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until 9/11, serves as a gruesome denouement in this new study, in which independent scholar Morris analyzes a largely forgotten chapter in American history. From Jones to Mother Ann Lee to “Walla Walla Jesus,” charismatic would-be prophets have established quasi-communist settlements as correctives to the racism, misogyny, rampant individualism, and capitalist greed they believed have characterized American society. To further foster this defiance of mainstream America, most of the communities also shared an aversion to the nuclear family, with celibacy frequently promoted “as a rejection of marriage, childbearing, and traditional kinship structures.” Morris is at his best when he discusses the man who arguably embodied these tenets more than anyone else: Father Divine (c. 1876-1965), a black spiritual leader and civil rights advocate. Father Divine was an important and influential figure in his day, yet his controversial views on family—followers were expected to change their names and leave behind wives, husbands, and children once they joined his movement—ensured his virtual erasure from the nation’s collective memory. Unfortunately, the rest of the chapters are somewhat dry, scholarly, and jargon-laden. Moreover, the brevity of many of the chapters impedes the narrative flow, and the brief epilogue would benefit from more information on post-Jonestown cults (David Koresh and the Branch Davidians receive only one paragraph). Ultimately, the book should serve as a useful reference for students of messianic movements and the history of American religion in general, but nonscholarly readers may lose interest at some point in the narrative.
An informative and occasionally enlightening survey of American messianic movements, but it will likely have limited appeal among general readers.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-213-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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