American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity By Paul K. Conkin Univ. of North Carolina Press 336 pp.; $55, hardcover; $18.95, paper
The most helpful thing about this study of six religious movements originating in America is the author’s seriousness about what adherents to the movements have believed and practiced. Conkin is a veteran historian of cultural and scientific as well as religious subjects; this book is a complement to another recently published synthesis, The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum Minds (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995), which focuses on the mainstream Protestant traditions lying behind modern Presbyterianism, Methodism, and Episcopalianism.
The six groups that Conkin gathers as “American originals” are the Restorationist churches (Disciples, Christian Church, Churches of Christ), Unitarian-Universalists, Adventists (with Jehovah’s Witnesses appended), Latter-day Saints, Christian Scientists, and Pentecostals (with Holiness churches considered alongside the Pentecostals). Most of the volume is given over to the kind of lengthy, intelligent, moderately interpretative articles found in specialized encyclopedias. Engagement with critical scholarship is minimal, but Conkin offers just the sort of introductory overview that many will find useful for these groups.
Conkin’s account takes much less notice of the way the American environment shaped the new religious movements than one finds in works like R. Lawrence Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986). But for questions like the contested status of Mary Baker Eddy among Christian Scientists (did she really call herself a second Christ?), on how Latter-day Saints take Joseph Smith’s teaching on the potential of all humans to become gods and how they continue the practice of temple “endowment” that stretches back to Smith, or on the forces that have drawn some Seventh-day Adventists closer to more conventional evangelicals, this book offers—with one exception—useful information. The exception is Conkin’s treatment of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, both of which are too complex, involve too many sub-groups, and have been the subject of too much solid writing to be neatly precised with the success that Conkin achieves for the others.
—Mark Noll
War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War By Michael Nelson Foreword by Lech Walesa Syracuse Univ. Press 277 pp., $29.95
Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War By George R. Urban Yale Univ. Press 322 pp.; $30
When authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were on trial in Moscow in 1966, Soviet citizens followed the case by listening to Western radio, then swarmed around the courthouse to be part of the scene. Daniel’s wife, visiting her husband in prison, used code language to let him know the West was reporting: She brought greetings from Grandmother Lillian Hellman, Uncle Bert Russell, little nephew Norman Mailer. The guard remarked what large families “you Jewish people have.”
This story and others, similarly riveting, are told by Michael Nelson. He also records testimonials to the effectiveness of Western radio from Andrei Amalrik, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, any number of dissidents—and ordinary people, too. Broadcasting was among the West’s best endeavors in what was always fundamentally a war of ideas. Some who didn’t then, and still don’t now, understand the nature of the contest have taken to saying that the Cold War never happened. Readers of Nelson and Urban will know better. These books tell a too-little-known chapter in the still-accumulating story, as long-secret archives open up, of what the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova decades ago called the “True Twentieth Century,” with totalitarianism as its distinctive theme.
Nelson, former general manager of Reuters, the international news agency, focuses on Western radio’s four major “voices”: the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty. His encyclopedic account displays the discernment and balance that one would expect from a good newsman located nearby but not within the institutions whose story he tells.
It is a story of high drama. While the “radios” fostered (in Nelson’s words) “basic human values,” the “concept of a civil society,” and a “sense of national identity,” the Communist governments responded by jamming the airwaves, requiring radios to be licensed, and instructing repair shops to block access in receivers to short-wave signals. RFE was bombed, perhaps by “Carlos the Jackal.” A Bulgarian bbc broadcaster was murdered. On the home front, Walter Lippmann called for VOA’s dismantling; Sen. William Fulbright, flip-flopping, turned from friend to foe of RFE/RL.
It is also a success story, with its desired grand finale. By the 1980s, if not before, the West’s “radios” were widely trusted behind the Iron Curtain. Listeners followed Western accounts of Chernobyl, which now looks like a key event in the delegitimizing of Soviet power. When Moscow plotters attempted a coup in August 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, isolated in his vacation dacha, took his bearings from the BBC, and later expressed his thanks. Soon graffiti in Moscow read, “Thank you voa for your truthful information.”
For his part, George Urban has every reason to say, “I told you so.” Hungarian by birth and then British by citizenship, this highly literate, devoutly Christian, and exceedingly plainspoken man committed his life to conveying truth to people whose governments told them lies, and the world turned out to be much as he described it. His most important post on the Cold War’s front lines was as director of rfe. Whereas rl, its sister operation, targeted auditors within the Soviet Union, RFE transmitted surrogate voices for the unfree in the Soviet satellite states.
Urban’s tale, too, has its cliffhangers. When the U.S. government foolishly funneled funds for RFE/RL through the Central Intelligence Agency, it gave ammunition to those who saw the CIA as the really evil empire. When the 1970s posture of detente lauded Eurocommunism as a happy middle way, Urban recalls “how close the West had come, through complacency, inattention, and incomprehension, to appeasing the modern world’s most complete and most tenacious despotism.” It was tricky to “counteract the materialism and moral relativism of the socialist way of life” when the West was largely in thrall to the same. Nor were even President Reagan’s underlings always supportive: In the heat of battle, it was easy to doubt Urban’s strategy of “evenhanded dispensation of untainted information.”
Now of course we can see the wisdom of leading from the West’s strength. Although Urban recognized that the Soviet empire fell mainly from inner rot, he earned the satisfaction he took from having long leaned against the tottering tower. It’s a pity, then, that he could not resist evening up old scores, as when he skewers his staunch ally, Margaret Thatcher, for her “wrong” view on European unification. Dying in 1997, Urban lived to see not only his narrative’s climax but its impending denouement. Apparently imagining that bad ideas die when their institutional embodiments do, the U.S. Congress is pulling the plug on RFE/RL at the end of 1999. Those of us who get our daily news fix via e-mail from RFE/RL will be left with CNN.
—Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Communities Edited by Amitai Etzioni Univ. Press of Virginia 313 pp.; $18.50, paper
This wide-ranging collection of essays expands the perspective offered in Amitai Etzioni’s 1993 communitarian manifesto, The Spirit of Community. While the writers represented here share a dissatisfaction with the reigning liberal paradigm, they are otherwise quite diverse.
The book’s highlights are the contributions by Michael Sandel and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Sandel critiques liberalism’s attempt to bracket from public-policy debates fundamental questions of the good life, concluding that the justice of laws is inseparable from the morality of the practices they allow or disallow. Elshtain shows that the thinned self of contemporary liberalism cannot account for the ties to one’s family and community—and to one’s past—that are not a matter of raw choice, ties that create a self bound by debts and obligations.
—Brad Stetson
Fiction
An Instance of the Fingerpost By Iain Pears Riverhead Books 692 pp.; $27
At first blush, Iain Pears’s new novel sounds like a routine mystery transposed to the seventeenth century for local color. On March 30, 1663, Robert Grove, Anglican priest and fellow at New College, Oxford, is poisoned; despite the indictment of a local woman, the identity of Grove’s murderer, never mind a motive for the killing, remains elusive. But the intricate and enchanting tale that is An Instance of the Fingerpost (the title is attributed to francis Bacon’s Novum Organum in a suspicious-looking epigraph; Pears is a tricky fellow) proves neither straightforward nor banal. I will apologize from the outset if I sound cagey, but this novel is one whose plot ought not be teased out in advance, for, while not spoiling the book (little could spoil this book), such revelations would certainly spoil the suspense.
Pears tells us early on that “discerning the truth” in this tale “is not so easy,” and he is not referring merely to Grove’s puzzling murder. The reader’s task of divining the truth is not made any simpler by the fact that there are four narrators—a Venetian Catholic, an Oxford student reading law, a mathematician cum cryptographer cum Anglican priest, and an antiquary—each of whom, Rashomon-like, relates a different version of the same events. In this book, things are not what they seem at all. Whores become ladies, traitors become loyal and then become traitors again, and wealthy landowners turn out to be impoverished lunatics. Those who initially disgust the reader turn into charming companions.
Meet, for example, Anthony Wood, our fourth and final narrator; he is much despised through the first three-quarters of the novel, wherein we learn that he is “absurdly scruffy,” wears “his spectacles in public, as though he had forgotten he was no longer in a library” (a charge to which I must plead guilty as well), has egregious table manners and even worse body odor. By the end, however, he proves more likable, and more trustworthy, than anyone else we have met.
Like Wood, most of the characters in An Instance of the Fingerpost did actually exist, and several of the central characters who are fictional are based on specific historical figures about whom very little is known. (Pears himself is trained as an art historian.) Grounding his narrative thus, Pears takes the liberty of inventing dialogue and thoughts and prayers for his characters. The result is a book that communicates the texture of seventeenth-century English life more powerfully than any scholarly monograph I have read. Pears tells us how the food tasted, how arduous traveling was, and how people felt about leeches. He tells us about “men who loved beautiful books, and about men who loved their King.” He tells us what the light was like.
There will always be things about the past that we can learn only from novels and poems. In this regard, An Instance of the Fingerpost deserves to stand next to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons. And like all the best historical novels, this book about the past transcends such generic categories.
Indeed, Pears’s insights often apply to the England—and America—of today. Particularly striking is his rendering of the debates about science that pervaded early modern England, adumbrating late twentieth-century conflicts over the role of scientific enquiry and the limits that should potentially be placed upon scientific experimentation.
The most piquant parallel between Pears’s seventeenth-century England and our own time is the preponderance of coffeehouses. The Venetian traveler Marco Da Cola enters one almost as soon as he arrives in Oxford; he notes that such establishments do not exist in Venice, and he wonders why the English seem to delight in paying exorbitant sums for mediocre coffee. I would be hard pressed to come up with a pithier articulation of my own feelings about Starbucks.
—Lauren F. Winner
Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD by Lou Cannon Times Books 698 pp.; $35
Three seconds. That’s the difference between what the world saw of the infamous Rodney King beating and what the unedited videotape showed of King’s arrest. Those initial three seconds show King charging LAPD Officer Laurence Powell, the action that precipitated the beating now etched in the public mind. Alas, ten seconds of blurred footage separated the first three seconds and the latter 68 seconds: you know which segment made the evening news.
Lou Cannon, L.A. bureau chief of the Washington Post from 1990 to 1993 and author of Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, details this and many other omissions from conventional wisdom’s fact file on that portentous March 3, 1991. The product of five years of interviews and extensive analysis of police transcripts and court records as well as internal lapd memos, Official Negligence is the definitive assessment of the King beating. As such, it has drawn accolades from publications as ideologically disparate as the Wall Street Journal and The Nation.
Simply stated, in the face of millions of words of received opinion, Cannon finds little evidence that racism played a role in the brutal apprehension of the recalcitrant Rodney King (the two other occupants of King’s vehicle obeyed instructions to get out of the car and lie face down on the ground). That doesn’t mean, of course, that the officers involved were free of the taint of racism, but their prejudices were no more relevant to the matter at issue than was King’s prior criminal record.
As Cannon’s title suggests, responsibility for the beating began with a mayor, city council, and civilian police commission more concerned with public posturing than with the reality of policing Los Angeles. A series of decisions severely limited the LAPD’s ability to apprehend troublesome suspects without resorting to a metal baton or firearm. “Choke holds” were banned in 1982, Taser stun guns were frequently ineffective, and funding for researching alternative methods of apprehension (e.g., capture nets and “leg grabbers”) was never approved. When this administrative negligence was compounded by a police department that disdained “community policing” and failed to provide adequate training in the use of the “Monadnock” baton, the result was a recipe for police brutality—at least whenever suspects refused to “come quietly.”
But Cannon recounts much more to place the beating in context. For starters, before King charged Officer Powell—that is, before George Holliday pressed “Record” on his camcorder—almost five minutes had transpired since the California Highway Patrol first stopped King after an eight-mile high-speed chase. When LAPD Sgt. Stacey Koon took over the arrest from a lower-ranking CHP officer, who was approaching King with gun drawn, he ordered all weapons to be holstered. Koon then told four LAPD officers to “swarm” King by jumping on him; King shrugged two officers off his back as they tried to handcuff him. Sgt. Koon also shot King twice with a Taser stun gun, with little effect. So before Officer Powell attempted to subdue King with a side-handled metal baton, efforts were made to apprehend King using the least violent measures. In short, what the public didn’t see, but what the jurors were apprised of, made all the difference in the world when the verdict came down.
Does Official Negligence restore confidence in American jury trials? Probably not enough, but it casts much light on both official and unofficial responsibility for this republic of ours. We do well to answer this wake-up call.
—Lucas E. Morel
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College. Lucas E. Morel is assistant professor of political science and history at John Brown University. Brad Stetson is director of studies at the David Institute. Lauren F. Winner is Kellett Scholar at Clare College, University of Cambridge.
