A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814719090 ISBN 13: 9780814719091

Publisher: NYU Press, 1999

Synopsis

The approach of the year 2000 has made the study of apocalyptic movements trendy. But groups anticipating the end of the world will continue to predict Armageddon even after the calendar clicks to triple 0s.
A Doomsday Reader brings together pronouncements, edicts, and scriptures written by prominent apocalyptic movements from a wide range of traditions and ideologies to offer an exceptional look into their belief systems.
Focused on attaining paradise, millenarianism often anticipates great, cosmic change. While most think of religious belief as motivating such fervor, Daniels' comparative approach encompasses secular movements such as environmentalism and the Montana Freemen, and argues that such groups are often more political than religious in nature.
The book includes documents from groups such as the Branch Davidians, the Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, and white supremacists. Each document is preceded by a substantive introduction placing the movement and its beliefs in context.
This important overview of contemporary politics of the End will remain a valuable resource long after the year 2000 has come and gone.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Daniels is the editor and publisher of the Millennial Prophecy Report. He has been collecting prophetic material from more than 1200 print and electronic sources.

Review

"Irving Howe"s career, with its constantly shifting strands of political activism, literary commentary, and accessible Jewish scholarship, makes a great subject for an intellectual biography. Painstakingly researched and fluently written, Gerald Sorin's book strikes just the right balance between sympathetic identification and critical distance. Making excellent use of interviews, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Sorin recreates the many significant issues that engaged Howe. He brings considerable drama to Howe's gradual break with Marxist sectarianism, his shifting perspectives on socialism, his momentous reconnection to Jewish culture, his battles with the New Left, and the literary controversies that accompanied his steady growth as a subtle reader and vigorous, penetrating critic."
-Morris Dickstein, author, "Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties"

"Gerald Sorin has written a lively and compelling biography of Irving Howe. A New York intellectual, Howe figured in most of the major and many of the minor debates of mid-twentieth-century America: socialism, modernism, Yiddish culture, civil rights, the new politics of postwar America, and the antiwar movement of the turbulent sixties. Howe spoke out forcefully and fearlessly, carving a place for intellectuals with moral vision. Sorin"s first biography deftly captures the complexity of the man and his eras."
-Deborah Dash Moore, author of "To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A."

"Sorin does a solid and convincing job of chronicling Howe's life and times."
-"The Jewish Quarterly Review",

""Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent" offers such an intellectually detailed and conceptually animated account of Howe's work. Sorin did an excellent job."
-"Magill's Literary Annual",

"What Sorin has accomplished in this beautifully written, balanced and probing intellectual biography is the most complete picture we have of Howe, a portrait of how one Jewish intellectual and activist struggled daily to balance scholarship and politics and the life of the mind and a life of action. . . . Sorin has ably captured the life and passion of this most unusual man, whose commitment to democracy is a legacy still worth cherishing."
-"LA Times",

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0814719090
• ISBN 13: 9780814719091
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Daniels Ted