But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. Fittingly, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA(U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Interweaving the fate of the remnants of the Mohawk Nation with the destiny of two lovers, Sara Donati's compelling novel creates a complex, profound, passionate portrait of an emerging America.Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elizabeth's ultimate destiny, here in the heart of the wilderness, lies in the odyssey to come: trials of faith and flesh, and passion born amid Nathaniel's own secrets and divided soul. An alliance with Todd could extract her father from ruin but would call into question the ownership of Hidden Wolf, the mountain where Nathaniel, his father, and a small group of Native Americans live and hunt.Īs Judge Middleton brings pressure to bear against his daughter, she is faced with a choice between compliance and deception, a flight into the forest, and a desire that will bend her hard will to compromise and transformation.
Financially strapped, Judge Middleton has plans for his daughter-betrothal to local doctor Richard Todd. Much to her surprise, she clashes with her own father as well. He is Nathaniel Bonner, also known to the Mohawk people as Between-Two-Lives.ĭetermined to provide schooling for all the children of the village-white, black, and Native American-Elizabeth soon finds herself at odds with local slave owners. And she meets a man different from any she has ever encountered-a white man dressed like a Native American, tall and lean and unsettling in his blunt honesty. It is December of 1792 when she arrives in a cold climate unlike any she has ever experienced. When Elizabeth Middleton, twenty-nine years old and unmarried, leaves her Aunt Merriweather's comfortable English estate to join her father and brother in the remote mountain village of Paradise on the edge of the New York wilderness, she does so with a strong will and an unwavering purpose: to teach school. Here is an epic of romance and history that will captivate readers from the very first page. and into the heart of a forbidden, incandescent affair between a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. Weaving a vibrant tapestry of fact and fiction, Into the Wilderness sweeps us into another time and place.
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