MixedThe Wall Street Journal... by dwelling on the rivalrous, often petty, personalities of all the participants, Ms. Hirshman effectively reduces the abolitionist movement to little more than a group of squabbling egotists. Surely, abolitionism had a moral force greater than the sum of its flawed parts.
Christine Leigh Heyrman
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMissions were [...] big business. Presiding over this great work from its headquarters in Boston’s Park Street Congregational Church was the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the largest corporation in the early republic ... And yet, in the mid-1820s, this religious juggernaut was nearly upended by a run-of-the-mill romantic triangle ... In Doomed Romance, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Christine Leigh Heyrman makes their story a window onto 19th-century middle-class evangelicalism, its sexual politics, and the hothouse atmosphere of small New England towns drenched in Calvinism. Relying on the parties’ own writings, Ms. Heyrman illustrates how they compulsively shared their inner lives, bridging the gap between the fixed idiom of evangelical spiritual narratives and the self-expression of romanticism. In this, Ms. Heyrman provides insight into what she calls the “lost emotional worlds of the past” while always recognizing just how distant that world is from our own. The book is a tour de force, meticulously researched, engaging, deeply humane and compulsively readable.
Mira Ptacin
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalWho doesn’t like a good ghost story? And in Camp Etna, the 143-year-old Spiritualist summer retreat located in the Maine hinterland just west of Bangor, author Mira Ptacin has found a whopping good one ... While the history may be a bit breezy, Ms. Ptacin’s depiction of Camp Etna’s residents—a \'quirky underworld of fringe characters\' and \'their truth\'—is both nonjudgmental and, pardon the pun, dead-on ... I won’t spoil the ending of the book; it’s a very good one, although not entirely unexpected.
Richard Brookhiser
MixedThe New CriterionBrookhiser’s eye for the telling anecdote is particularly valuable as he sets the scene and explains the issues at stake. What emerges is a vivid picture of the early nineteenth century’s freewheeling economy, ethically challenged local governments, and a legal profession that thought nothing of someone serving as attorney general while representing private clients ... Brookhiser offers a less than enthusiastic appraisal of Marshall, both as a man and as a jurist, a stance seemingly driven by Brookhiser’s own skepticism about the Court’s place in contemporary America, a point he mentions but fails to develop fully. ... Brookhiser’s depiction of Marshall as a dinosaur stranded in the age of mammals seems overdrawn.
