Review by Booklist Review
Before settling in Los Angeles in 1918, groundbreaking fundamentalist evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson gathered a following as an itinerant minister traveling the country preaching and faith healing. In 1923, she built America's first megachurch, Angelus Templein. Home base of her Church of the Foursquare Gospel, it seated 5,300 and included a radio station that broadcast her sermons nationwide. Renowned for her charisma and optimistic approach to salvation, McPherson became a national celebrity before disappearing while swimming in 1926, presumed drowned. She reappeared several weeks later, claiming to have been kidnapped, but was hounded by accusations of falsifying the incident to cover up a liaison with a married man. Neither definitively proven nor disproven, the scandal caused a split between McPherson and her mother, McPherson's staunchest supporter and the church's financial expert. Hoffman (Greetings from Utopia Park, 2016) uses church archives, court documents, extensive historical research, and McPherson's prolific writing to give her subject her due as an innovative and important part of the evangelical movement while also showing the toll celebrity took on her personal life.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Hoffman (Greetings from Utopia Park) offers a vivid biography of Aimee Semple McPherson (1890--1944), an evangelical leader and radio pioneer whose ascendance to near-sainthood was shattered by scandal. Hoffman follows McPherson from an "isolated" childhood in rural Canada to a spiritual awakening brought about by Pentecostal preacher (and first husband) Robert Semple; tours of tent revivals along Florida's "spiritual circuit"; and permanent residence in L.A., where her success culminated in the 1923 construction of the "Colosseum-like" Angelus Temple. McPherson's rise was disrupted by her dramatic disappearance while swimming at Venice Beach in May 1926. The frenzied search that followed claimed the life of a rescue diver and prompted the suicide of a disciple, so the public was outraged when McPherson reappeared in Mexico three days after her own memorial service (which garnered "more than $36,000" from her congregation). McPherson claimed she had been abducted but managed to escape, a tale challenged by eyewitnesses who reported spotting her at "an oceanfront cottage with her lover." Through felony complaints and two trials, the saga's details get increasingly sordid (a "blind lawyer drowned in a ditch," a "pileup of deaths," and journalists hired "to commit blackmail"). Painting the evangelist as part grifter, part troubled soul, Hoffman illuminatingly pinpoints how McPherson "prefigures" today's influencer-dominated world, where "pop culture language" can blend with "ideas about the divine" to manufacture new truths. It's a revelatory study of how power, religion, and fame intersect. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Journalist Hoffman (Greetings from Utopia Park) captures the details of the extraordinary, sometimes controversial life of Aimee Semple McPherson (1890--1944), called America's most famous woman evangelist. She came from humble beginnings on a farm in Ontario but was never one to let circumstances or societal expectations limit her. After revival tents and missionary work in China, ringing bells for the Salvation Army in NYC, and traveling the U.S. as an itinerant preacher, McPherson's penchant for spectacle and storytelling eventually led her to Los Angeles, where in 1923 the Pentecostal evangelist established what could be considered the first American megachurch, plus her own radio station. Though she was dogged in her later years by rumors of scandal and allegations of moral impropriety, she stayed at the helm of her ministry until her death. VERDICT Readers who enjoy richly detailed biographies that read like fiction will appreciate Hoffman's latest. Many will note comparisons to modern televangelists and women religious leaders.--Jennifer Moore
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In the gospel business. The charismatic evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944) was a national celebrity as leader of the largest church in America. Largely forgotten since her death, she is revived in journalist Hoffman's empathetic--and dramatic-- account of her life. Raised in a Christian home, the young Aimee claimed to have been infused with the spirit of Jesus when she attended a church of the Holy Rollers in her Canadian hometown. She fell in love with preacher Robert Semple; in 1908, they married, moved to Chicago, and were ordained as pastors, soon traveling abroad as missionaries. By 1910, Robert was dead, and Aimee and their infant daughter returned from Hong Kong to New York, where she and her mother became proselytizers for the Salvation Army. Aimee, though, had bigger ideas: harnessing "the wildness of Pentecostal spirit," with her mother as a vigilant manager, they drove cross-country to Los Angeles and set up a church in a tent. Preacher, faith healer, and inspiration, Aimee soon amassed thousands of followers whose contributions enabled her to build a megachurch, hire a stage manager to design her spectacles, and rent costumes and scenery from Hollywood studios. Marriage and motherhood (she had a son with her second husband) came second to spreading God's word. But scandal dogged her: in 1926, she disappeared, turning up in Mexico after a month, claiming to have been kidnapped. When her alleged perpetrators were caught, inconsistencies in her story led to revelations about an affair and fueled accusations of her being a "fame-hungry huckster." Lawsuits, bitter family rifts, and money problems marred her last years. Hoffman's discerning biography is as much a work about faith, self-mythologizing, and ambition as it is, in Hoffman words, "a cautionary tale about fame." A well-researched portrait of an outsize personality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
