A worthwhile addition to the corpus of Lincoln studies.
A portrait of Lincoln’s faith life, with a changing America as the backdrop.
Zeitz, a contributing writer at Politico and author of Lincoln’s Boys, provides a broad overview of the rapidly changing faith journey of Lincoln individually and of the antebellum U.S. as a whole. The author explains that Lincoln was raised in a strictly Calvinist home, the son of hard-shell Baptists, who “distrusted seminary-trained theologians and believed that God could speak through ordinary laypeople at least as well as college-educated elites. They had little use for ecclesiastical authority.” It was a theology quite opposed to the evangelical and reforming church movements sweeping across America at the top. Lincoln rejected much of his parents’ theological beliefs, and he forged his own path while never quite shaking the concept of God as a distant judge. Zeitz spends most of the text describing how evangelical Christianity was transformed in a matter of decades into the dominant faith expression in America. “What started in the backwoods as a challenge to organized Christianity,” he notes, “became, in effect, the new Christian establishment. Evangelical Christianity wove itself inextricably into…civic and private life.” Lincoln, meanwhile, remained largely immune to this spiritual tide. He was, at best, a deist who respected yet dismissed traditional Christian beliefs. The Civil War—and, within that larger story, the personal suffering caused by the death of his son, Willie—changed everything, however, and in his final years, Lincoln became, if not a conventional Christian, definitely a man of deep and searching faith. Lincoln saw himself as an instrument of God, charged with waging a war meant to punish the entirety of the nation for the sin of slavery. Whose side God was on, if either, was known to God alone. Throughout, Zeitz is a competent guide to this specific piece of American religious history.
A worthwhile addition to the corpus of Lincoln studies.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781984882219
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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