ARTS Review of reviews: Books
celebrity clerics like Graham, the movement had begun to coalesce before Falwell established evangelical Christianity as the heartbeat of the Reagan-era Republican Party.
Book of the week The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald (Simon & Schuster, $35)
The cultural power of American evangelism has often blindsided nonbelievers, said Lily Rothman in Time. In Frances FitzGerald’s new book, a work “as zippy as a 752page history can be,” surprise resurgences become a motif. In the 1790s, the Second Great Awakening startled the Founding Fathers. In the 1930s, fundamentalist churches brushed off defeat in 1925’s Scopes Monkey Trial to build a ready audience for Billy Graham’s postwar crusades. In the 1970s, the emergence of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority stunned pundits who had declared God dead. FitzGerald, the author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning 1972 history of the Vietnam War, clearly doesn’t like the agenda of the modern Christian right, said Terry Eastland in The Wall Street Journal. But in her effort to understand the movement, she has crafted a compelling history that’s “impressive for its level of detail.”
Novel of the week American War
Newscom
by Omar El Akkad (Knopf, $27) This is “a most unusual novel”—in part because it’s unusually chilling, said Rayyan Al-Shawaf in The Boston Globe. Journalist Omar El Akkad’s entry into fiction asks us to imagine a late-21stcentury America plunged into civil war, this time over a law banning fossil-fuel extraction. Fought with drones, biological weapons, and offshore torture centers, this War Between the States has turned many Southerners into refugees, including a Louisiana tomboy who by the novel’s end cannot resist the lure of terrorism. “There are considerable flaws in American War,” said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. But though El Akkad indulges in contrivance and melodrama, he also writes with “propulsive verve,” and his time reporting in Afghanistan has given him a “bone-deep” understanding of the impact of war on civilians. Though armed conflict hasn’t visited the continental U.S. in more than a century, the country is growing more divided by the day. American War looks at where those widening splits could lead, and makes the consequences “alarmingly real.”
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An evangelical service in northern Virginia
FitzGerald sweeps through decades of history “with a Barbara Tuchman–like grace,” said Douglas Brinkley in The Boston Globe. She begins in the 1740s, when theologians like Jonathan Edwards bucked tradition and took to the fields and streets, delivering emotive sermons that sometimes attracted tens of thousands of listeners. Revivals spread across the land, as the preachers’ focus on each believer’s personal connection to Jesus appealed to listeners’ individualism. No surprise, then, that the nation’s evangelical Protestant sects seldom acted as a united force until the mid-20th century. But led by
Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell (Doubleday, $35) The shadow of Richard Nixon “looms longer and darker than ever,” said Aram Goudsouzian in The Washington Post. Watching Donald Trump rise to power by demonizing the press, the Washington establishment, and myriad minority groups, it’s easy to see him as an heir to the divisive politics of the last president to be chased from office. But Nixon wasn’t simply a proto-Trump, and John A. Farrell tells Nixon’s story “with punch and insight” in a book that may be “the best one-volume, cradle-to-grave biography that we could expect about such an elusive subject.” Farrell shows us that Nixon wasn’t “Tricky Dick” from birth. As a result, “this portrait is more damning.” Farrell “understands all too well that Nixon was a vat of contradictions,” said Jennifer Senior in The New York Times. Born the insecure son of a failed Yorba Linda, Calif.,
Despite FitzGerald’s mastery of her material, “she makes one astounding error of taxonomy,” said Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books. The Evangelicals focuses almost exclusively on white evangelical Protestantism, a decision she justifies by writing that the history of the African-American church “is a different story, mainly one of resistance to slavery and segregation.” But most black churches are evangelical and have had huge political influence. Still harder to understand is why FitzGerald forgets about evangelism’s past resurgences when she tells us it’s splintering as a movement. She even cites the 81 percent of evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump as evidence not of a political resurgence but of believers rejecting the guidance of church leaders.“She may be right,” said Glenn Altschuler in the Pittsburgh PostGazette, but given history, “it is probably wise to think—and think again—before making predictions about the future of religion and politics in America.” rancher, the Nixon we meet here initially engenders sympathy: His love letters to Pat, his future wife, are both “endearing and pathetic”—“the desperate pleas of the runt of the litter.” Early on, he also made surprising alliances, said Robert Landers in The Wall Street Journal. As a young congressman, Nixon was good friends with House mate John F. Kennedy, close enough that in 1954 he tearfully prayed that Kennedy not die during a risky surgery. That relationship changed, of course, and Farrell pinpoints Nixon’s loss to Kennedy in 1960’s presidential election as the experience that soured the Californian for good. The book’s biggest bombshell, revealed late last year, concerns Vietnam, said Anthony Marro in Newsday. Farrell, chasing old rumors, uncovered an aide’s notes indicating that in 1968 Nixon orchestrated an effort to dissuade the South Vietnamese from agreeing to a peace settlement until after that year’s U.S. election. And then come those repulsive White House tapes, said Steve Donoghue in CSMonitor.com. The recordings, whose existence was made public during the Watergate investigation, vividly memorialize Nixon’s shocking venality. Farrell’s “superb” book does add nuance to Nixon’s story. “But some reputations can’t be salvaged.” THE WEEK April 21, 2017