674 Reviews of Books
there, in general Joseph’s is a biography that focuses on
the political and social dimensions more than the in-
timate.
Joseph argues that Carmichael’s encounter with
Kwame Nkrumah, overthrown as leader of Ghana in
1966 and in exile in Guinea, helped push Carmichael
down the path of building a Pan-African political party
in the United States. The fruits of this initial 1967 meet-
ing emerged more fully in the following years, and that
development is very much part of Joseph’s story. At the
same time, Joseph’s choice to focus on the eight years
from 1960 to 1968 influences the extent to which we see
how that plays out. The first 30 years of Carmichael’s
life span the first 300 pages, while the last 25 years—
during which he changed his name to Kwame Ture as
a way to honor Nkrumah and Sékou Touré—are con-
densed into roughly 25 more episodic pages. One of the
book’s great strengths is the depth devoted to the 1960–
1968 years, even as it also becomes one of its few weak-
nesses.
This leaves the door open for those seeking more
about Carmichael/Ture’s relationship with Africa and
Pan-Africanism, a terrain needing further interroga-
tion. That said, those familiar with the era that Joseph
covers will find themselves enriched by the details he
brings, while those less familiar will find a sure-handed
guide through the era and the remarkable life of
Stokely Carmichael.
JAMES H. MERIWETHER
California State University, Channel Islands
STEVEN P. MILLER. The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s
Born-Again Years. New York: Oxford University Press,
2014. Pp. viii, 221. $24.95.
Steven P. Miller’s The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s
Born-Again Years joins Daniel K. Williams’s God’s Own
Party: The Making of the Christian Right (2010) as the
best recent cultural-political surveys on their subject.
The book’s cultural side focuses on the many avenues
through which over the last half century formerly sec-
tarian fundamentalist or Pentecostal white Protestants
have entered the American mainstream: through effec-
tive spokesmen like James Dobson, who gained wide
popularity by providing advice on parenting and child-
rearing; through the unprecedented success of Hal
Lindsey’s apocalyptic The Late Great Planet Earth
(1970), the best-selling book of any kind for the 1970s;
through publicists like Marabel Morgan, who piously
promoted the joy of sex for religious conservatives;
through NGOs like Habitat for Humanity and World
Vision that have won positive recognition for human-
itarian service; through attention from Hollywood in
the wake of evangelical enthusiasm for Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ (2004); through ecclesiastical
re-thinking that produced a plethora of mostly subur-
ban megachurches with weekly attendance climbing
well into the thousands; through spectacular media suc-
cesses like the Left Behind series (1995–2007) of apoc-
alyptic novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins; and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
through strategic alliances with other ethical conserva-
tives, especially Roman Catholics, to make common
cause as culture warriors. Appealing to such phenom-
ena, Miller suggests that “[a]s evangelicals embraced
the therapeutic turn, other Americans proved respon-
sive to the therapeutic side of born-again Christianity”
(p. 22).
Hinge figures like the apologist Francis Schaeffer (d.
1984), who turned from Christian evangelism aimed at
alienated youth to public consciousness-raising for the
pro-life cause, and Rick Warren, pastor of the very
large Saddleback Church south of Los Angeles and host
of well-publicized forums for presidential candidates,
link the cultural narrative to the political story. A high-
light is Miller’s expert tracking of evangelical political
salience in the national media. First came the explo-
sion, as if from nowhere, of evangelical political activ-
Downloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Sussex on June 6, 2016
ism in the era of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan,
followed by media panic among non-evangelicals, but
then cooling to reduced attention in the Bill Clinton
years. George W. Bush’s message of “compassionate
conservatism” galvanized a new surge of white evan-
gelical political activity, but also badly frightened a raft
of commentators who wrote as if fearing some kind of
theocratic coup. Miller labels the spate of distraught
hand-wringing that greeted President Bush’s reelection
in 2004 “the second evangelical scare” (p. 135), even as
he shows why that fright receded rapidly in the era of
Barack Obama. For the Bush years, Miller helpfully dif-
ferentiates between “faith-based policies,” which had at
least some chance of building coalitions among other-
wise antagonistic parts of the electorate, and “faith-
based politics” (p. 125), which Republican operatives
exploited for partisan advantage. Miller is equally help-
ful in depicting President Obama as able, for both po-
litical and personal reasons, to talk some of the evan-
gelical talk without necessarily walking the evangelical
walk. He also points out that the Obama electoral vic-
tories helped resuscitate a small cohort of left-leaning
evangelicals. As Miller shows early in the book, such
social liberals had pioneered modern evangelical po-
litical engagement in the 1960s, only then to be over-
whelmed by the surging New Christian Right as soon as
evangelical voters turned on Jimmy Carter.
Miller makes excellent use of a rapidly growing roster
of increasingly sophisticated monographs, including
books by Randall Balmer, Amy DeRogatis, Darren
Dochuk, Axel Schäfer, Matthew Avery Sutton, David
R. Swartz, John G. Turner, Grant Wacker, and Molly
Worthen. He also draws insights from sociologists Rob-
ert Wuthnow (on the postwar reconfiguration of Amer-
ican religious allegiance), James Davison Hunter (on
the dimensions of a national culture war), and D. Mi-
chael Lindsay (on the emergence of nationally recog-
nized evangelicals in politics and business). The result
is attractive, informed, and accessible contemporary
history ideally suited for assignment in surveys of post-
war America, especially if read alongside David Hol-
linger’s After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liber-
alism in Modern American History (2013), which argues
APRIL 2015
 Canada and the United States
that the values of mainline Protestants have triumphed
even if evangelical numbers far outstrip the shrinking
mainline.
Doubts concern only the extent of what Miller has
documented. While evangelicals have certainly ad-
vanced far outside the beleaguered margins that still
feature large in some evangelical self-descriptions, it is
not clear that they should be positioned in the national
story as Miller contends. His own account of the small
contingent of evangelicals active in research universi-
ties offers an accurate portrait, but a portrait under-
scoring their relative irrelevance in that world. Simi-
larly, although an evangelical presence is not entirely
lacking in the nation’s largest industries, in the mar-
keting of college and professional athletics, in the
courts, and in the elite print media, it stretches a point
considerably to view evangelicals “at the very center” of
these important facets of national life (p. 7). Questions
about this aspect of his argument notwithstanding,
Miller has combined wide reading with skillful writing
to narrate well a convincingly complex story.
MARK A. NOLL
University of Notre Dame
NICOLAS RASMUSSEN. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the
Rise of Biotech Enterprise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2014. Pp. viii, 249. $35.00.
In 1978, the “biotech industry” was a couple of start-up
companies with a handful of employees working largely
out of academic labs. By 1990, it was a multi-billion-
dollar industry employing tens of thousands of people
that had generated enormous hype, launched the larg-
est initial public offering in history, brought several
medical innovations to market, and become a new
model for both university-industry collaboration and
science-based business.
Nicolas Rasmussen explores this transformative pe-
riod from the birth of biotechnology into what might be
called its adolescence: the period after its first gener-
ation of products had reached the market; and after the
early start-ups had either failed, merged with larger
drug companies, or expanded so much as to little re-
semble the academic-industrial hybrids they once were.
He tells this story by following the development of five
of the first ten rDNA drugs to be approved in the
United States: human insulin, human growth hormone,
alpha interferon, erythropoietin (Epo), and tissue plas-
minogen activator (tPA).
After a synthetic chapter tracing the unfolding of mo-
lecular biology from the mid-twentieth century through
the invention of recombinant DNA technology in the
early 1970s, the rest of the substantive chapters each
follow a strand of the biotech story through the devel-
opment of one of these five products. As Rasmussen
notes, this requires some chronological overlap across
chapters, and bits of the story introduced in one part of
the book occasionally pop up again in others. In gen-
eral, though, this organizational device works very well,
as Rasmussen never loses sight of the fact that these
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
675
individual narratives are in service of a larger one about
the birth of a new, important, and unusual industry.
In his choice of sources, Rasmussen makes a virtue
of necessity. Without industry archives to draw upon, he
turns to a rich and unconventional range of documents.
Trained as a biologist, he relies heavily on the scientific
literature; he extensively uses oral histories conducted
by himself and others (notably the valuable biotech col-
lection at the University of California, Berkeley Ban-
croft Library’s Regional Oral History Office); and, most
innovatively, Rasmussen draws on the large volume of
legal documents—including many internal company
papers that would otherwise be inaccessible—gener-
ated by the lawsuits that accompanied nearly every
commercial advance made in biotech’s first decade.
Each chapter of the book not only follows the cre-
Downloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Sussex on June 6, 2016
ation of a particular biotech product, but also highlights
one aspect of the dramatic changes in the life sciences
that were concomitantly taking place. These range from
the fierce early competitions between commercial and
academic labs (in the human insulin story), to research-
ers’ creative efforts to convert scientific capital into fi-
nancial capital and vice versa (Epo), to how the need
to conduct clinical trials and market products pushed
the early biotechs to become more like big drug com-
panies (tPA). Rasmussen’s account of how the aggres-
sive patent battles over Epo and tPA shaped the future
of the industry by setting a low bar for the issuance of
biotech patents is particularly valuable, and made pos-
sible by his deep engagement with highly technical (in
both the scientific and the legal sense) material.
In keeping with that engagement, Gene Jockeys: Life
Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise is heavy
throughout on the development of the science itself,
which is an important contribution but does slow the
narrative for the less technically inclined reader. Ras-
mussen’s explicit intent is to avoid an internalist ac-
count of science, and certainly much of the book is fo-
cused on the interests—both financial and academic—
that shape the environment in which science is done.
Still, the book could have drawn more explicit connec-
tions between the dramatic changes taking place in the
organization of science and the progress of the science
itself. The science story is always placed in its human
context. But the counterfactual remains unaddressed:
how might the science have unfolded differently if the
life sciences had not, in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
been the hothouse of academic and commercial inter-
ests that they were?
This is particularly relevant in light of Rasmussen’s
normative position on the restructuring of the academic
life sciences during the early biotech era. While the
book is not polemical in tone, Rasmussen argues
strongly that biotech was a “Faustian bargain” (p. 5).
The commercialization of academia may have acceler-
ated the process through which these drugs were
brought to market, but the new biotech firms were reap-
ing the low-hanging fruits of decades of public invest-
ment. In doing so, though, they changed the way life
APRIL 2015