Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian FitzGerald (Fire in the Lake) provides a compelling narrative history of "the white evangelical movements necessary to understand the Christian right and its evangelical opponents." Dispatching pre-20th-century events in the first three chapters, and the period from 1900 to 1945 in just two more, FitzGerald focuses most closely on evangelical culture and politics from the rise of Billy Graham through the Obama presidency. She skillfully introduces readers to the terminology, key debates, watershed events, and personalities that have populated the history of white American evangelical Protestant culture in the last half-century. She explains issues such as fundamentalism, biblical inerrancy, Christian nationalism, civil religion and anticommunism, the charismatic movement, and abortion, and introduces such diverse figures as Karl Barth, Jerry Falwell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Pat Robertson. Also present, though less prominently featured, are members of the evangelical left, such as Ron Sider and James Wallis. Attention to intraevangelical theological and political differences is especially welcome at a time when evangelical and even Christian have become stand-ins for the Christian right. A substantial bibliography and endnotes will assist readers who wish to delve more deeply into specific topics. This is a timely and accessible contribution to the rapidly growing body of literature on Christianity in modern America. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Another superb work by renowned but long-absent political journalist FitzGerald (Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth, 2002, etc.), this one centering on the roiling conflict among American brands of Christianity.The author opens with a brief revisitation of a moment when progressive evangelicalism seemed ascendant: the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter, which soon gave way to a reborn kind of hidebound Christianity in the form of the anti-humanist Christian right, "declaring holy war against secular humanism' and vowing to mobilize evangelicals to arrest the moral decay of the country." Thus ever it has been, from the burned-over revivalism of the 19th century to the latest religio-revanchisms from Colorado Springs or Lynchburg. By FitzGerald's account, this revival of the right truly has been a revival, for after the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, "most informed people thought fundamentalism dead." However, through rightists such as Billy Graham, fundamentalism was reborn as a political force. FitzGerald traces the culture wars that have since riven the country to the divisions between liberal and right-wing visions of Christianity as well as larger elements of society. In the 1960s, she notes, "most conservative Christians were horrified by the counterculture, but a number of young evangelical ministers, most of them Pentacostals, saw the potential in it for conversions." Granted that many of the converted became conservative themselves and that the Christian right is, in the author's view, mostly a reaction against the social revolution of that era, what has happened since is truly fascinating: the right wing of evangelical American Christianity has made a devil's bargain with politicians such as the sitting president, who claimed the Bible as his favorite book but "did not seem to remember even a verse of it." In making that bargain, it also may be making a last stand, since millennials are abandoning religion in droves, and those who do go to church are "on the whole more sympathetic with progressive positions than with those of the right." Overflowing with historical anecdote and contemporary reportage and essential to interpreting the current political and cultural landscape. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Far more important than hanging chads, it was praying Evangelicals who put the born-again George Bush in the White House in 2000. But Bush's electoral victory figures as just one episode in FitzGerald's capacious history of Evangelical American Protestantism. This rich narrative ranges across the various Evangelical denominations while illuminating the doctrines especially personal conversion as spiritual rebirth, and adherence to the Bible as ultimate truth that unite them. FitzGerald particularly excels in limning pivotal Evangelical personalities: from the brimstone-preaching Jonathan Edwards, who kindled Colonial America's Great Awakening; through the indefatigable Dwight Crazy Moody, whose Bible societies preserved faith during the Gilded Age; to Billy Graham, whose Evangelical charisma vaulted him into twentieth-century celebrityhood. The Evangelical movement takes on a newly political character when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson enlist late twentieth-century coreligionists as Religious Right warriors on issues such as school prayer, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and same-sex marriage. Conservative readers may judge FitzGerald too one-sided in her indictment of Evangelicals for having polarized America on these matters. But few can dispute her conclusion that conservative Evangelical leaders have lost clout, millions of those in Evangelical pews blithely ignoring their leaders' anathemas against the casino-building womanizer Donald Trump. A complex and fascinating epic.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2017 Booklist

THE EVANGELICALS: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) FitzGerald's fair-minded history focuses on the doctrinal and political issues that have concerned white conservative Protestants since they abandoned their traditional separation from the world and, led by Billy Graham and others, merged with the Republican Party. WHITE TEARS, by Hari Kunzru. (Knopf, $26.95.) Two white hipster record producers create a "classic" blues song as an internet hoax, but it turns out (perhaps) to be real. This dark, complex ghost story about racial privilege, cultural appropriation and (of course) the blues is written with Kunzru's customary eloquence and skill. SEX AND THE CONSTITUTION: Sex, Religion, and Law From America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century, by Geoffrey R. Stone. (Liveright, $35.) A professor's history takes off as it approaches the increasingly tolerant present; Stone can recognize a good anecdote or a colorful character when he sees one. JERZY, by Jerome Charyn. (Bellevue Literary, paper, $16.99.) This novel, based on the life of the celebrity fiction writer and fabulist Jerzy Kosinski, has a light touch but manages to lift heavy subjects. Charyn makes the real and the imagined sound equally plausible. BLITZED: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) The Third Reich was literally an altered state, according to Ohler's provocative account: methamphetamines for the SS and the troops, along with factory workers and housewives; cocaine, steroids, sex hormones and an early form of OxyContin for the Führer. THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURY: The Extraordinary Adventure of "Les Misérables," by David Bellos. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Rarely has a work of literature suffered so at the hands of publishers, translators, filmmakers and musical impresarios, as Bellos's impeccably researched and pithily written book demonstrates. It doubles as a fascinating partial biography of Victor Hugo. EVENINGLAND: Stories, by Michael Knight. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) Knight pays careful writerly attention to the details of desperation among prosperous characters in his impressive story cycle set in and around Mobile Bay, Ala. The ghost of Walker Percy hovers. THE IDIOT, by El if Batuman. (Penguin Press, $27.) An innocent, language-intoxicated teenager, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard in the '90s to pursue love and (especially) literature in Batuman's hefty, gorgeous digressive slab of a novel. EARTHLY REMAINS, by Donna Leon. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) The seemingly unstoppable polluting of Venice's great lagoon is at the heart of this new mystery. The 26 th of Leon's novels featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, it is one of her best, and saddest. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.

Evangelicalism might appear as a -monolithic movement that regularly rises and flames out while attempting to impose its will upon society. FitzGerald (Lake of Fire) provides a more nuanced and diverse portrayal of evangelicalism. The first third of this book is a historical overview of evangelicalism from the First Great Awakening in the 18th century to the Neo-Evangelical movement of the 1940s and 1950s. A clear historical arc provides insights into the background and dynamics that animate evangelicals today and the history they share with so-called mainline -denominations. FitzGerald's focus, however, is a detailed exploration of the last 50 years, with a particular emphasis on the rise of the Christian Right and its role in politics and the Republican Party. Given the relatively compressed time frame, FitzGerald does a remarkable job of navigating through the weeds, putting caricatures of evangelicals to rest. One should note that while they have much in common, FitzGerald does not include African American churches because their history with their white counterparts diverges early on. VERDICT FitzGerald has provided readers of U.S. history and religion an excellent work that is certain to be a standard text for understanding contemporary evangelicalism and the American impulse to reform its society.-James Wetherbee, Wingate Univ. Libs., NC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Fitzgerald's Evangelicals are a subset of the larger evangelical movement that emerged during the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries and became an important element in the religious ecology of the US. Fitzgerald (who is an award-winning writer) focuses on leaders and congregants in this protean tradition--Presbyterians and Pentecostals--who consciously shaped governmental and social behavior through revivals, legislation, and in recent years the Republican Party. She chronicles the tides of evangelical fervor, corresponding with believers encountering new ideas, livelihoods, locations, and populations, suggesting the power of certain faith in a changing world. Not always successful in national policy making, Evangelicals have shaped state laws and policies, and through denominational politics and schism have countered the influence of mainline Protestantism and many expressions of social Christianity. Focusing on well-known figures--John Gresham Machen, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Rick Warren--the author captures a culture that is diverse and subject to change over time. Despite divisions over public issues since 2006, more than 80 percent of self-described Evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016. Synthetic more than original, Fitzgerald's narrative demonstrates how and why her Evangelicals seek to sculpt the US in their own image. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Edward R. Crowther, Adams State University