Under God

This attractive book should win awards for its innovative design and layout even while raising eyebrows with its revisionist text. Mac and Tait, the Grammy and Dove Award-winning members of Christian band DC Talk, move from the tremendous success of their Jesus Freaks series to take a quickie tour of American history. It's certainly more nuanced than some other Christian interpretations of the nation's founding, as the Founders are allowed to have a few flaws. (Benjamin Franklin, for all his teachings on thrift and industry, was a slave-owning dandy, for example.) The authors don't stop with the Founders and Framers, but carry forward the American story in a greatest-hits manner while touching on freedom fighters (Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr.) and political leaders through the 20th century. But the historical merits of this book are shallow in the area of religion. In their determination to show the Christian foundations of the American nation, the authors strongly overstate the evangelical bona fides of their heroes. Thomas Jefferson appears all through the book, for example, but the authors never discuss his controversial reworking of the Bible with all of the miracles and supernatural elements excised. And Sojourner Truth is cast as a classic evangelical Christian with no mention of her forays into the Kingdom of Matthias cult or spiritualist seances. Still, the lasting appeal of this book is its stunning design, not its one-sided view of history. With jagged-cut pages, Old World backgrounds, ""distressed"" illustrations and bold sidebars, the book's appearance is both arresting and ingenious.