Excellent biography which pulls no punches. Bill Coffin had a positive influence on a lot of people (including me), but he was not without his flaws. While the world seems a different place in so many ways than in Coffin's heyday (60s and 70s)--who, in an age of social media, cares about preachers anymore?--there are broader issues worth examining here, from the public to the personal. Public: is Coffin's message of social justice any less relevant now when the economic chasm between rich and poor has only yawned wider? Personal: can anyone become a great leader without great cost to his personal relationships with others? ( )

Though the assertion in the preface that Coffin “remains the last of a once flourishing breed in American public life: the liberal Protestant minister preaching to the nation’s faith and conscience” is unnecessary hyperbole (some of that breed who, like Coffin, are alive and well appear later in the book), that Coffin is one of the most influential religious figures of the twentieth century is beyond dispute. This insightful and engaging biography paints him as the successor to Martin Luther King, Jr. and as the liberal Protestant counterpart to Billy Graham. Both comparisons offer insight into political and religious fissures of great significance in twenty-first century America. Goldstein’s account of Coffin’s life is also a compelling biography of American liberalism in the twentieth century, right down to its anti-Communist, conservative, patriarchal, and privileged roots. Goldstein wisely gives Rabbi Arnold Wolf and Coffin himself the last words. According to Wolf, Coffin is, politically, “not particularly radical, courageous in a personal way, but not particularly vanguard or unusual”; but he is a “real” and “authentic” preacher, “giving classical Christian sermons based on the Bible.” Authenticity permeates Coffin’s life (even the more troubled aspects of it), which he describes in the end as an “instrument” to be played by God--a classically Christian (and thouroughly Niebuhrian) vision.