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The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, by Susan Jacoby
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Review
“A must-read book.” —Bill Moyers, from “Moyers & Co” interview (Bill Moyers Moyers & Co.)“Jacoby succeeds in capturing Ingersoll's remarkable appeal across sectarian and political boundaries. His warmth, humor, tolerance, and rhetorical skill are vividly conveyed, and they are validated by much contemporaneous testimony from figures who would ordinarily have been expected to shun an infamous blasphemer.”—Frederick Crews, University of California, Berkeley (Frederick Crews)“As someone who did brave battle with narrow-minded fundamentalists in his own day, Robert Ingersoll would surely be appalled at the political influence of their heirs today. But their very rise makes Susan Jacoby’s fine, compact and judicious account of Ingersoll’s life and ideas all the more important. She has given us a splendid intellectual portrait of an American who deserves to be far better known.”—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and To End All Wars (Adam Hochschild)"Robert Ingersoll used his wit to blast the absurdities of religion, while his warmth kept him close to his audiences. He has found his perfect biographer in Susan Jacoby, who uses his story to provide deep insights not only into Ingersoll’s century but our own."—Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)“Susan Jacoby has written a necessary, informative, and intelligent survey of the life, times, and writings of a most neglected figure in American history. A serious and thoughtful reflection on a topic of interest to historians, humanists, and social scientists, let alone general readers, The Great Agnostic will deepen one of the most important of contemporary debates.”—Alan Wolfe, author of The Future of Liberalism (Alan Wolfe)“Jacoby’s goal of elucidating the life and work of Robert Ingersoll is admirably accomplished. She offers a host of well-chosen quotations from his work, and she deftly displays the effect he had on others. For instance: after a young Eugene V. Debs heard Ingersoll talk, Debs accompanied him to the train station and then — just so he could continue the conversation — bought himself a ticket and rode all the way from Terre Haute to Cincinnati. Readers today may well find Ingersoll’s company equally entrancing.” —Jennifer Michael Hecht, The New York Times Book Review (Jennifer Michael Hecht The New York Times Book Review)“Jacoby writes with wit and vigor, affectionately resurrecting a man whose life and work are due for reconsideration.”—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe (Kate Tuttle The Boston Globe)“In this persuasive biography, Jacoby makes the case that Americans are dearly indebted to Ingersoll, and would be well-served to revisit his life and writings at a time when religious thought continues to be a divisive force in American civic life. . . . In this important volume, Jacoby illuminates a mind worth celebrating and the story of a life well lived.”—Mythili Rao, The Daily Beast (Mythili Rao The Daily Beast)Won Honorable Mention for the 2013 Southern California Book Festival, in the Biography/Autobiography category, sponored by JM Northern Media LLC. (Southern California Book Festival JM Northern Media LLC 2013-10-22) Won Honorable Mention in the 2013 Great Midwest Book Festival for the Biography/Autobiography category, given by JM Northern Media LLC (Great Midwest Book Festival JM Northern Media LLC 2013-11-04)
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About the Author
Susan Jacoby is the author of numerous books, including Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism,The Age of American Unreason, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, and The Last Men on Top, a recently published eBook. She lives in New York City.
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Product details
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st edition (January 8, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780300137255
ISBN-13: 978-0300137255
ASIN: 0300137257
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.5 out of 5 stars
116 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#737,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
An easy to read and engaging biography of this not well-known American hero of liberty, science, human rights, and irreligion. The story of his life is woven into the examination of his liberal progressive positions on social issue of his day, which seem to be many of the issue we are debating still. The short, concise book is a good introduction to Ingersoll if you know little of him and is also interesting to Ingersoll-philes by organizing the chapters thematically around the causes and issues he advocated. So, rather than a strictly chronological read, Jacoby dives, one by one, into the major topics of his many speeches, and interviews: Science, including Darwin's Theory of Evolution; separation of church and state; free speech, especially blasphemy; women's rights and equality; Humanism and Freethinking; and his criticism of the Bible, church, and preachers. The value of a new, modern biography is that it can show us how relevant the work of its subject can still be to us today. With references to recent current events, people and debates, she illustrates how Ingersoll's words and arguments are still relevant. She closes with a chapter addressed to the so called `new atheists' advising that they should be learning from Ingersoll and giving him credit for having advanced the conversation challenging religion over 120 years ago. Highly recommended. If you have never heard of Ingersoll, you will ask yourself, "Why haven't I ever heard of this man before?"
Susan Jacoby's THE GREAT AGNOSTIC reveals Robert Ingersoll as a freethinker who saw no difference between an agnostic, as he was dubbed, and an atheist. He claimed that no one knows whether or not God exists; believers believe it, and nonbelievers don't. He didn't believe it. The term "agnostic," which dates back to 1869, may have been coined (probably by Thomas Henry Huxley) to separate honorable American nonbelievers from the pejorative connotation of the much older term, atheist. In any case, "agnostic" in Ingersoll's time didn't seem to carry the noncommittal connotation it does today, because Ingersoll was quite vocally and cheerfully a nonbeliever.Jacoby's short, scholarly, hypnotically readable biography of Ingersoll recalls him as a happy man. He became famous as a 19th century American orator, and people flocked to hear him because his talks were so good humored and entertaining. Both believers and nonbelievers enjoyed his talks, and only believers who took the Bible literally (fundamentalists today) hated him.Ingersoll was not like many nonbelievers of his time, who subscribed to a "social Darwinist" theory that certain classes of people are superior to others. Ingersoll's father had been an abolitionist preacher, and Ingersoll championed human rights--including workers' rights, women's rights, and children's rights. He detested corporal punishment and dramatically spoke out against it. He was far ahead of his time.He was a happily married father of daughters who grew up without a religious education, but who learned to read the Bible as literature. He was well-read and proud to be an American. He revered Abraham Lincoln, and he resurrected Thomas Paine from obscurity. Among his friends were Henry Ward Beecher (a Christian preacher and the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN) and Mark Twain.Jacoby has done a wonderful service to readers everywhere through her portrait of Ingersoll--whom I previously discovered in her 2004 bestseller, FREETHINKERS. What a marvelous experience it is, in the politically divided American society today, to discover a great 19th century American, Robert Ingersoll.--Kirsten I. Russell, author of Tales from Tripoli: An American Family's Odyssey at a Libyan Boys' School
Susan Jacoby sets out to -- and in her afterword advises "new" atheists to work tenaciously to -- restore Robert Ingersoll to his rightful place in American history. In two hundred pages, she makes a compelling case. Ingersoll was not only a champion of freethinkers, he widened the field for religious moderates and everyone who prefers a secular government and public sphere. And he lived an interesting life in interesting times.My only criticism of this story is that American freethought during the end of the 19th century seems very isolated. Jacoby has called this period the Golden Age of American freethought (in Freethinkers as well as here); it was also the golden age of British freethought, and the two traditions were in regular contact with each other. One example would be contraception, which Ingersoll advocated on the basis of women's right to control their own bodies. It wouldn't detract from Ingersoll at all to acknowledge that freethinkers advocating birth control had a long and important history on both sides of the Atlantic when Ingersoll took up the issue. Of course you can't do everything in 200 pages, but in her letter to the new atheists, the author calls out to readers of some contemporary British atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens. Perhaps there would be less need to re-establish these ties across the water if we knew more about the ongoing transatlantic interactions between people like Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, Frances Wright, R. D. Owens, Charles Knowlton, Charles Bradlaugh, Abner Kneeland, Gilbert Vale, and Robert Ingersoll throughout the 19th century.But that's my own pet project. Read the book! Rediscover Ingersoll!
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