If Jesus and J.P. Morgan sat down to write a social history of early New England, this would be it. Innes (History/Univ. of Virginia; Work and Labor in Early America, not reviewed) deftly combines religious and economic historiography to tell the story of those who, armed with a ``moral capitalism,'' created in New Canaan a worldly society out of God's word. Innes argues that the particular strain of Protestant worship that the Puritans brought with them to Massachusetts Bay contained within itself the formula for a capitalist state and the ingredients for the early colonial theocracy's undoing. A culture of discipline imbued each aspect of Puritan life with holy significance. Every act, personal or professional, had as its aim the celebration of God, and labor was no exception: Raising one field of corn glorified God, but raising two fields glorified him more. To signify their righteousness, Puritans thus set to their daily tasks with holy zeal. But such discipline brought wealth, prosperity, and success, which in turn brought the Puritans face to face with a dilemma. As Innes puts it: ``Piety produces industry, which produces wealth, which produces status conflicts and worldliness.'' To abandon their formulation would be to abandon the very definition of New World Christianity, but to continue to pursue it would be to corrupt their religious community slowly from within. The author dramatically delineates the theocracy's slow unwinding as reflected in the sermons and speeches of the Puritan fathers, showing how Puritan society moved inexorably from righteousness towards worldly prosperity. Though his thesis is a familiar one, Innes gives new strength to an old idea, exploring the myriad ways in which the Puritan ethic became the capitalist's greed.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03584-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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