A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

JEFF SHESOL, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"Powerful ... Egan...writes with brisk authority and an eye for the vivid, and unsettling, detail. There are many in this book, which reads at times like a screenplay for a crime procedural, at others like a horror film ... There is a sureness to Egan’s storytelling as he moves from scene to scene ... A Fever in the Heartland is gripping; as a rumination on the moral obscenity of white supremacy — whatever guises it wears — the book is damning ... Yet it goes too far in its central contention: that Oberholtzer, as the subtitle declares, 'stopped' the Klan before it could 'take over America' ... Egan’s book tells some of their stories, but in elevating one above the rest, it underplays what had come to constitute, loosely but effectively, a countermovement. The blow that Madge Oberholtzer struck against violence and depravity is no less heroic for the fact that others struck their own."