- The New York Times Book Review (front page review)Keeping the Faith is history at its most delicious, presented free from the musty smell of the archives where it was clearly assembled with great care.
- Michael Luo, The New YorkerWineapple…has a knack for producing popular histories with contemporary resonance…A briskly told chronicle.
image copyright Frank Fournier Brenda Wineapple
Brenda Wineapple is the acclaimed author of such books as Keeping the Faith and The Impeachers, among many others. Synthesizing history and literature, she often writes about overlooked events to speak to contemporary cultural issues from a historical perspective.
- Michael Kazin, The NationNo one has written a richer or more dramatic narrative of the trial or its leading combatants than Wineapple has in Keeping the Faith.
- Matthew Stewart, The New York Times Book ReviewKeeping the Faith is history at its most delicious, presented free from the musty smell of the archives where it was clearly assembled with great care. And if you have been awake for the past 16 years or so, you won’t miss the point. The struggles of yesteryear between reason and ignorance do not merely illuminate those of the present. They are the same struggle. This is a story from a past that isn’t even past.
- Michael Luo, The New YorkerWineapple…has a knack for producing popular histories with contemporary resonance…A briskly told chronicle.
- The AtlanticIncisive…Wineapple’s outstanding book…provides a vivid account of how fear has always acted on our national consciousness.
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)[A] gripping and expansive reexamination of the Scopes Monkey Trial…this historical investigation pulses with urgency
- Drew Gilpin Faust, New York Times bestselling author of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at MidcenturyBrenda Wineapple brings the past to life with her compelling rendition of the extravaganza that was the Scopes Trial and with her vivid portraits of Darrow and Bryan, its jousting antagonists. But her book speaks chillingly to the present as well as she recounts a battle about science, religion, truth, and freedom of thought that seems much closer than a century ago.
- Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin RooseveltKeeping the Faith is a brilliant account of the Scopes trial, as fair minded as it is well-written, as compelling as it is richly detailed—and as relevant to today’s America as it is faithful to the America of a century ago. [The] vivid, nuanced portraits of its two great protagonists, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, are unforgettable.
- Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and What the Qur’an MeantMuch of what we think we know about the famous ‘Scopes trial,’ we don't. Our misconceptions need correction; and there is no better corrector than Brenda Wineapple.
- Evan Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of Road to SurrenderBrenda Wineapple makes the most of a magnificent cast—Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, H.L. Mencken—to bring to life a drama that captivated the nation a century ago. ‘Democracy was on trial,’ she writes—then as now. A master of historical narrative, Wineapple has given us a bracing and illuminating tale for our own troubled times.
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