A Christian-to-Christian approach to defusing the rage of the far-right evangelical set.
What would Jesus do? Not submit to the poisonous MAGA agenda, for one, as this book of faith and fire argues.
Former assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security, Neumann was effectively frozen out during the last days of the Trump administration, when a key test for continued employment was “to gauge the depth of loyalty” to the president. Republican, conservative, and Christian, the author regarded Trump as a danger to national security and democracy—an assessment shared by far too few of her fellow Dallas churchgoers. Neumann’s approach in this description of the various shades of Christian extremism seems to jump from audience to audience. Some of it exhorts Christians to “[walk] the Way of Jesus—loving and empathizing with those in pain and in the darkness—[which] can point to where true light and hope can be found”); some of it warns students of extremist politics, as when she cites statistics indicating that 8 million Americans believe that political violence is justified, to which she asks: “If tomorrow the director of the National Counterterrorism Center announced that there were 8 million ISIS or Al-Qaeda followers in the United States, how would the country respond?” Neumann charts the MAGA movement’s enlistment of Christian churches, and especially megachurches, with conservative pastors impugned as moderates “and moderate pastors as Marxists.” As to what to do with true believers, Neumann suggests, “if you are friends with someone who has a radicalized loved one, they need your support. Some people may experience deep shame from having a loved one go off the deep end to traffic in hate.” As a guidebook for how to handle the deranged uncle at the Thanksgiving table, Neumann’s book is useful.
A Christian-to-Christian approach to defusing the rage of the far-right evangelical set.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781546002055
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Worthy/Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
