Eisenstadt is a fastidious scholar and a seasoned historian who has spent more than a decade steeped in Thurman-related archives—including at Boston University, where the Howard Thurman Collection is located and where Thurman was Dean of Marsh Chapel; in San Francisco, where he was pastor of the Church for the Fellowship of All People, also where he died; at Howard University, where he taught; and at Morehouse College, his alma mater—as a coeditor of the five-volume Howard Thurman Papers Project (University of South Carolina Press, 2009–2019). Eisenstadt's biography constitutes a comprehensive treatment of Thurman's bold adventures, far and wide, inward and outward, but Against the Hounds of Hell is also a sustained call to action, a charge that extends to each of us, asking us to follow Thurman's example in “continu[ing] to oppose humanity's most tenacious and implacable foe, our voluntary imprisonment within our fears, our lies, and our hatreds” (394).

Thurman once bemoaned the shortcomings of the first biography written about his life: Elizabeth Yates's Howard Thurman: Portrait of a Practical Dreamer (John Day, 1964). Thurman claimed that it was “a good story as a story,” but then demurred that a biography of his life “would have to be both factual and creative” (379). Thurman's winsome autobiography, With Head and Heart (Harcourt, 1975), was completed only years before he died in 1981. Eisenstadt's biography is a factual treasure trove, to be sure, but he also tells a very creative story about Thurman's relentless struggle on all fronts “against the hounds of hell”—i.e., fear, deception, and hatred. The compelling story that Eisenstadt tells is initially set within the context of the Pilgrimage of Friendship to South Asia and the historical significance of Thurman's conversation with Gandhi, in India in 1936, about nonviolence and social transformation. This stage of Thurman's life was the focus of Eisenstadt's previous volume on Thurman, which he wrote with Quinton Dixie: Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Beacon, 2011).

Not altogether unlike the scholar who undertakes a biography of Martin Luther King Jr.—who was indelibly influenced by Howard Thurman—the would-be biographer of Thurman is confronted with an array of anxieties about whether one is really qualified, in terms of breadth and depth, as a scholar but also as a person. Admonitory lessons abound. Think of those critics who suggest that too much of what is written by scholars of King—and by extension Thurman—suffers from sundry biases: it is not sufficiently sensitive to Southern culture, it is ignorant of the intricacies of the Black church, that too much attention was paid to this phase of his life, too little was devoted to other features of his personality, or that it attempts to reduce the brilliance of King to his scholarly influences. And while there are many ways of getting it wrong when writing a biography—and this volume avoids complaints listed here—there are also many ways of getting it right. Eisenstadt's biography of Thurman demonstrates one way of getting it right because it is conscientious and creative.

In Against the Hounds of Hell, Eisenstadt deepens our appreciation for Thurman's thought by placing it within its broader sociohistorical and geopolitical context. Though Thurman is undeniably unique, the struggles he confronted are illustrative of an entire generation of African Americans who were constantly accosted with racism, militarism, and poverty. Eisenstadt suggests that Thurman was much more politically active than we tend to imagine him. Thurman believed that “resistance may be overt action, or it may be merely mental and moral attitude” (269), and this biography reveals the broad spectrum of strategies by which Thurman resisted the hounds of hell. Thurman was undeniably courageous for his times, though his contribution to the Civil Rights Movement typically occurred behind the battle lines and away from the spotlight. Eisenstadt discloses how Thurman was often far out ahead of his contemporaries when it came to the pressing social issues of feminism, ecumenicalism, environmentalism, pacifism, liberation theology, and the Black social gospel movement, which Gary Dorrien describes in The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2015).

Thurman's psychosocial and theological, if not mystical, insights appear to be standing the test of time, a message that is somehow timeless yet always timely, and one suspects that each next generation of scholars will find fresh waters of inspiration in the luminous darkness of his thought. The unique message that Thurman espoused for those with their backs against the wall still resonates for those persistently and perniciously pursued—as the title captures—by the hounds of hell. What protects us against these proverbial hounds of hell is nothing more or less than the power of love as expressed in the religion of Jesus, and for Thurman, the religion of Jesus was not the same thing as the institution of Christianity. Eisenstadt provides his readers with an extensive bibliography and an instructive set of research notes. Against the Hounds of Hell is a substantial contribution to the burgeoning secondary literature on Thurman.

Eisenstadt's biography succeeds in demonstrating that Thurman was “one of the unacknowledged persons around whom twentieth-century America revolved, one of its quiet pillars” (393), but he also suggests that Thurman's brooding insights are as prescient if not prophetic for our own times as they were when he first uttered them. The edges of Thurman's legacy will continue to grow, it seems, and this is in no small part due to Eisenstadt's carefully researched, as well as creatively documented, biography. Thurman thought that “the time and place of a man's life on earth are the time and place of his body, but the meaning and significance of his life are as vast and as far-reaching as his gifts, his times, and the passionate commitment of all his powers can make it” (With Head and Heart, 208). Thurman's gifts were vast; his commitment was unwavering. Eisenstadt helps us better appreciate the deep meaning and broad significance of Howard Thurman's remarkable life.