A worthwhile and understated conclusion closes an unremarkable Reformation history.
To understand our modern world, one must understand the Reformation.
Gregory (European History/Notre Dame Univ. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, 2012, etc.) jumps on the bandwagon of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation with this uneven retelling. He opens by promising that “a major theme of this book” is the fact that “the Reformation’s influence remains indirect and unintended.” However, he waits until the last quarter of the book to expound on this conclusion. This serves to undermine one of the author’s greatest strengths: his ability to explain how the Reformation molded—unintentionally—our current, largely secularized world. Gregory instead focuses on the life of Martin Luther, the movement he sparked, and its immediate aftermath throughout Europe. He begins with Luther’s troubled faith life, leading up to his disputes with Rome over points of theology as well as church authority. The author then examines the early Reformation, including such significant figures as Huldrych Zwingli, before moving ahead to John Calvin, the religious upheavals in England, and the Thirty Years’ War. Though intermittently interesting, these chapters add few new insights to supplement the many biographies of Luther or histories of the Reformation already in print. Further, Gregory’s use of the present tense eventually becomes grating. It is at the end that the author partially redeems himself, coming to the insightful conclusion that “the long-term outcome of the Reformation era—and its ultimate irony—has been the gradual, unintended secularization of modern Western society.” Essentially, Gregory explains that as Europe grew weary of religious warfare, it found ways of separating faith from governance as a way of keeping the peace. It is an intriguing conclusion that deserves more than the pages allotted to it.
A worthwhile and understated conclusion closes an unremarkable Reformation history.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247117-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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