Gura’s nuanced, dense and illuminating narrative makes a perfect a companion to Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001),...
Comprehensive history of America’s first public intellectual movement.
Gura (American and Religious Studies/Univ. of North Carolina; Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical, 2005, etc.) notes that transcendentalism has largely been viewed as a brief phase in the history of ideas in the United States, almost exclusively associated with the poetic essays of Emerson and Thoreau. This tightly written survey of intellectual currents in early-19th-century New England may change that view. Gura reminds us just how influential the movement was and argues that its core ideals remain with us today. The roots of transcendentalism lie in a thorny and seething theological debate among Unitarians. How can the belief in an ordered universe require miracles to sanctify the divinity of Christ? It’s a question with no clear rational answer. That’s why transcendentalists, fueled by the German Idealist philosophy of Kant and the Romantic poetry of Coleridge, argued against objective understanding of the scriptures and for the emotional experience of faith. This notion of godliness inherent in human consciousness combined with the democratic zeal of the young republic to fuel a regional, then national feeling that it was possible to better the world. The loosely tethered transcendentalists finally divided over the question of precisely how to make things better. In one direction went George Ripley, Orestes Brownson and Theodore Parker, who aimed for social justice, while Emerson and his disciples stressed self-reliance and rugged individualism. Differences were set aside during the Civil War to battle slavery. Afterward, exhausted and eager to embrace a future quickly being shaped by the Gilded Age, transcendentalists became totally in thrall to Emersonian ideals of political libertarianism.
Gura’s nuanced, dense and illuminating narrative makes a perfect a companion to Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001), as each considers the two dominant and ever-conflicting themes in American intellectual history: idealism and pragmatism.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8090-3477-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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