Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (Library of Religious Biography (LRB))

This simple book gives insight into both a man and a period in evangelical history!

This is a very balanced biography. The author wrote in an accessible writing style that is easy to understand. This book was so entertaining I finished reading it in about 3 days! I liked the notes section at the back.

This is written in a highly positive fashion about Billy Sunday's ministry. It is very informative and contains a lot of original material such as newspaper articles and sermons. Worth a read, and when you do, compare it to the situation we have in America today. The parallels are truly striking.

A critical treatment of Sunday`s life, as part of the Library of Religious Biography series. Separates Sunday`s evangelistic career into four sections: beginnings, rise, prominence, and decline. One chapter is devoted exclusively to Sunday`s legacy. Includes the sermons "Heaven," and "Get on the Water Wagon."

In Dorsett's accessible book, the author describes how a former baseball star became the most popular American evangelist during the early twentieth century. From his childhood in the rural Midwest to the height of his career holding a citywide campaign in New York City, Dorsett attributes Sunday's success to his willingness to follow the Lord's calling. Unlike earlier biographies, Dorsett uses the Sunday Family Papers to portray Sunday's life from both within and without his tabernacles. Dorsett notes Sunday's faults but presents them without belittling his character. The book is sympathetic yet critical. Dorsett delves into Sunday's devoted relationship with his wife as well as his children's failures. The book lacks a summary of Sunday's theology, but it covers in detail the character of his enthusiastic preaching.

?Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America,? by Lyle W. Dorsett for the ?Library of Religious Biography? series and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company is a short, yet well rounded and objective, biography of Billy Sunday.A first-rate biography covering Billy Sunday from A-Z in less than 160 pages: no small task considering the importance of Billy Sunday and early 20th Century evangelism.However, Dorsett subtitle is somewhat misleading: ?and the Redemption of Urban America,? as he only devotes one chapter to it and its mainly regarding Billy Sunday?s pitfalls regarding his enormous financial success in from 1908-1920. Very little detail on Sunday?s most historically significant reform movements: movements heavily tied towards his Midwestern background and Mid-America?s fear of industrialization and urbanization in the early 20th Century: temperance and prohibition legislation, Sunday closing laws, gambling, card playing, reading love novels, Saturday and Sunday drives in the county with members of the opposite sex in that devilish automobile when you should have been going to church, non-religious dancing and music, liberalism, evolution, alleged decadent dress and loss morals of modern women and the general discontentment of masculine Christianity in early 20th Century America. Topics covered in greater detail in Roger A. Bruns?, ?Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism? and in Robert Francis Martin?s ?Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of America.?Regrettable too is the lack of footnotes or endnotes in his text: only a brief section towards the end of his book on sources.Included in his biography are two complete sermons of Billy Sunday in the appendix titled, ?Heaven? and ?Get on the Water Wagon.? Two important sermons of Sunday that Dorsett believes have been misquoted by other biographers and historians.While it is lacking in significant detail concerning these reform movements, it is still a first-rate and objective biography of Billy Sunday that can be read in a short amount of time.