A missed opportunity to explore an important cultural change in the making.
A pundit considers the decline of Christian religious influence on American politics and culture.
For most of America's history, white Protestantism has been a dominant cultural force, providing what E.J. Dionne calls “the civic and moral glue that held American public life together.” A combination of demographic change and the abandonment of churches by younger generations may be bringing this era to an end, creating theological challenges for churches and political and cultural challenges for the nation. Public Religion Research Institute founding CEO Jones (Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life, 2008, etc.) charts the rise and decline of white Protestant churches and their cultural hegemony over the past century. He hits his stride in his description of the two great branches of American Protestantism, the mainline churches and the evangelicals, and their competition for cultural dominance, and in his all-too-brief conclusion, with its thoughtful consideration of how Protestant churches and American society could best adapt to the new dispensation. Unfortunately, a core definitional issue plagues the work. The author at first indistinctly defines the phrase "white Christian America" as "the domain of white Protestants in America"; Irish Catholics, for example, do not count. Further uncertainty persists throughout as Jones uses the term differently according to context, referring variously to a group of people today, a similar group in the past and their cultural norms, and even some evangelicals' social agenda. These constantly shifting meanings confuse readers and are reflected in a failure of topical focus, leading the author to pay excessive attention to well-documented but ultimately tangential discussions of sectarian foot-dragging on such issues as desegregation and gay rights and a purported "white Christian strategy" on the part of some Republican operatives. Finally, the author's thesis is overstated. Though white Protestants may no longer be a demographic majority or a dominant social force, they remain a significant social and political influence.
A missed opportunity to explore an important cultural change in the making.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2229-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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