PanThe New RepublicDespite its size, the scope of FitzGerald’s history is oddly narrow. Like many historians, she sees the 1980s as the moment when the Christian Right ‘reintroduced’ religion into politics—a focus that makes it difficult to persuasively connect recent events, like the rise of Trump, with the long and extraordinary history of compromises and shifting allegiances among evangelicals … FitzGerald makes clear from the beginning her intention to write a history of white evangelical politics, but is there really any such thing as a white American history without black history?...In 1957, or even 1967, well-intentioned white historians evidently thought [so]. But in 2017, with race at the heart of the politics that gave rise to Trump and what may well be the most fundamentalist cabinet in history, any account that seeks to place our religious past in ‘contemporary history,’ as FitzGerald puts it, must make race central to its concerns.
Barry Meier
PositiveBookforum\"...exposes the storied workings of global spycraft as run by a largely improvised, and oddly random, ensemble of bit players, striving to project some larger meaning onto what are, at bottom, all-too-mundane transactions ... Just how he disappeared is never made clear, but Missing Man leaves ample room for speculation. In fact, having read this fascinating, convoluted book, I can’t tell you much of anything with certainty about the case of Bob Levinson other than some preliminary details. Narratively, the book is strongest in its first third, in which Meier establishes Levinson as the hero of our story: a retired FBI agent bored with corporate investigations after a swashbuckling career building cases against the Mafia, South American drug cartels, and Russian organized crime ... [The] shaggy-dog litany of power players drives home still another peculiar point about Missing Man: For all the money and power at stake in this underworld of global resource-and-espionage intrigue, the story of the missing man is ultimately the story of absurd connections between the world’s elites and their minions.\
