Armchair historians who can tolerate Waldman’s occasional stylistic indulgences—e.g., dramatic single-sentence paragraphs,...
An energetic pop history surveys America’s commitments to religious liberty from the 17th century to the present.
As journalist and Beliefnet co-founder Waldman (Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, 2008, etc.) shows, whatever you may have learned in elementary school about the Puritans, the Colonies were hardly bastions of religious freedom; in fact, using executions and arrests, English leaders harshly enforced various ecclesial establishments. It wasn’t until the American Revolution that the Founding Fathers crafted norms of religious liberty. James Madison is the star of Waldman’s account; Thomas Jefferson shows up for his 1801 use of the phrase “wall of separation between Church & State,” but the author pays too little attention to his important role in pushing for religious toleration in revolutionary Virginia. The late-18th- and early-19th-century articulations of religious freedom were the true beginning of the story. In the decades that followed, many groups, including Catholics, Latter-day Saints, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, prodded the nation to further embody its ideals of religious liberty. As late as 1942, Franklin Roosevelt opined that America was “a Protestant country and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.” Indeed, as Waldman’s especially helpful discussion of the post–World War II landscape demonstrates, the 1940s brought a new push for interfaith understanding—Amy Vanderbilt’s etiquette guide included a chapter on it—as a sort of generic, pluralist faith was marshalled as a counter to communism. The 1940s also saw the Supreme Court taking a more expanded role defining religious freedom; in earlier decades, argues the author, the shape of religious liberty was largely left up to local governments. Turning to the present, Waldman suggests how anti-Islamic sentiment among non-Muslim Americans provides a way of assessing the reach and the limits of America’s commitment to religious pluralism.
Armchair historians who can tolerate Waldman’s occasional stylistic indulgences—e.g., dramatic single-sentence paragraphs, breathless ellipses, lengthy block quotes—will be rewarded with an informative account.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274314-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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 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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