Lady Mary

 I've enjoyed the first two YA historical novels I've read from Lucy Worsley, so Lady Mary was a bit of a letdown. Using a real and well known person rather than a witness to history, Worsley is constrained by the facts of Mary Tudor's adolescence. Watching her parents marriage dissolve and spending years in increasingly desperate isolation just isn't as dramatic as being companion to a volatile Princess Victoria or seeing your friend Catherine become Henry VIII's fifth wife. Like all of Worsley's books it's entertaining, but nothing special. 

A Piece of Justice

 There's a bit of uncanny valley reading books written during my early adulthood. The 1990s are far enough back now that a new book set there would technically be a historical, and I can't help placing myself in the context of the book. Jill Paton Walsh's second mystery, A Piece of Justice was published in 1995, otherwise known as the Time Before Cell Phones, and Imogen Quy, nurse for St. Agatha's College, Cambridge, might have continued her medical studies rather than giving them up for her former fiance if she's been born in the late 60s instead of the mid 50s. Imogen rents rooms in the house she inherited from her parents and one of her boarders takes on the biography of a deceased Cambridge mathematician. One researcher has died and another disappeared and it appears that the widow is behind the crimes. Imogen solves the mystery with a bit of coincidence, a quilt, and a trip to Wales. It's a quick read (under 200 pages), and a good way to spend a cozy afternoon. 

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

 I spent my early years in the Catholic wing of the Religious Left, and when my first grade school closed ended up in the rising Religious Right so I've been less surprised by some of the religious/political developments of the last three decades than most people of my political persuasion. I don't understand it - to me, the Religious Right views religion as based in hate rather than love - but it rarely surprises me. Even when they chose a promiscuous, foul-mouthed, bullying, avaricious con-man who bragged about sexual assault as their political savior, something in the back of my mind said, "Yeah, I get it."

Kristen Kobes DuMez offers a more inside view of this development in American religious practices. As Kevin Kruse did in One Nation, Under God she finds the roots of the movement in the backlash to integration. Her book focuses more on the causes than the results, going back to the early Twentieth Century to show revivalists (like those parodied by Sinclair Lewis) preached muscular Christianity and the condescending protectiveness it brought. From there, Christian sects gravitated towards power rather than mercy, convincing themselves that God wants strength and retribution. They began to follow preachers rather than the actual bible, leading to a surprising ignorance of scripture, and spread their views into all walks of life, particularly the military. DuMez follows different threads in each chapter - home schooling, anti-feminism, fear of societal change, love of violence - but doesn't quite tie everything together. I think that's the point, though. She's telling the origin story of a movement we already know.