Review: Sister, Sinner
Sister, Sinner is the a biography of a sort I don’t see often enough. Claire Hoffman picked someone who cries out for biography and walks through that life in a lively way without putting making it too obvious to the reader what she thinks. I am impressed that she can make me very interested in Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, realize that she is a very important figure in the history of America, of Los Angeles, and in the history of Religion in America, and still let me decide what I think of all that.
McPherson (Semple McPherson? And there’s another husband in there later… I’ll stick with McPherson) definitely led a life. She built a Pentecostal church out of fervor and charisma. Then using the mass media of the time – radio and newsletters – made it a nationwide church movement. And then there is either a kidnapping or a faked kidnapping. And then Los Angeles politics gets involved. And when it all seems to die down McPherson refuses to let it. It is a wild story just in the facts of it.
Hoffman digs in. Everything she describes is well sourced. McPherson was a celebrity of the day on a par with British royalty or Hollywood stars, so there is copious contemporaneous news coverage as well as detailed church records and some tell-all books. Hoffman sifts it all into a narrative, but leaves the ambiguities there for the reader to weigh.
Strongly recommended.