Publishers Weekly
02/06/2023
Boston University religion professor Prothero (Religious Literacy) chronicles the life of influential editor Eugene Exman in this edifying entry. Exman, who served as a religion editor at Harper & Row from 1928 to the mid-’60s, helped shape American cultural conversations about faith, shifting focus from “protestantism to pluralism, from dogma to feeling, and from organized religion to the religion of experience” by publishing books that targeted a middlebrow audience. Exman’s titles, which included Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom and Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness, offered insights from the “best and brightest” religious thinkers to lay readers, and he eventually brought writing on Hinduism and Buddhism to the mainstream. In 1947, Exman published Howard Thurman’s The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death, initiating a focus on works about race, eventually leading to his working with Nobel Peace Prize winners King and Albert Schweitzer on books that investigated nuclear disarmament and civil rights. As well, Prothero charts Exman’s religious evolution and his lifelong search for spiritual meaning that led him to psychedelics and Hindu meditation. Though sometimes the pages can be distractingly overcrowded with accounts of the personalities surrounding Exman, Prothero delivers penetrating takes on the ways religion interacted with popular culture during a period of change, and the whole is fortified by deep research. This fascinates. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Prothero delivers penetrating takes on the ways religion interacted with popular culture during a period of change, and the whole is fortified by deep research. This fascinates.” — Publishers Weekly
"Prothero introduces readers to both a surprisingly important figure and to a number of books worth rediscovering." — Booklist
“An engrossing read.” — Christian Century
"Prothero... is one of the freshest modern thinkers about American religion.... God the Bestseller operates on two levels. One is a biography of Exman...,On another, more compelling level, the book is about Exman’s interaction with a hit parade of the great religious leaders of the 20th century." — America Magazine
This is a major book that fills a huge hole in our understanding of the 20th century development of the idea that “all religions are one.” The discovery of the papers of Eugene Exman has enabled Prothero to establish how Exman, as publisher and spiritual seeker, cultivated a network of like-minded writers whose books promoted a claim that fundamentally reshaped the popular understanding of religion in the U.S. and beyond. — Ann Taves, Distinguished Professor (Emerita), Department of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara
"Nobody has heard of Eugene Exman of Harper & Row, but if you wonder what you believe and where you first read about it, he is the likely source. Exman transformed culture through his popular eye. One of our most acute observers of modern American religion takes the life work of an editor and shows how he opened the study of religion to the world." — Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
Ann Taves
This is a major book that fills a huge hole in our understanding of the twentieth century development of the idea that all religions are one.“