In St. Francis of America, Patricia Appelbaum considers the popularity of St. Francis of Assisi in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Appelbaum's work offers an important intervention in the expanding body of scholarship on Catholic saints in North America, by taking the study of America's “most popular saint” outside of a Catholic context, to focus on the non-Catholic actors—from scholars, ministers, and novelists, to activists and well-to-do homeowners—that have together built Francis's reputation within the United States. St. Francis of America follows the recent turn in historical scholarship toward studying the afterlives of saints—how saints “live anew” in the commemorative writings and practices of people. Appelbaum explores how Francis of Assisi's thirteenth-century attributes, both the verifiable and the mythic, have resonated differently—have meant different things—at different moments in U.S. history. In the author's words, “various images of St. Francis are historically conditioned: they reflect the cultural preoccupations of their time” (4).

The book's chapters proceed chronologically; each considers non-Catholic interpretations of Francis during a different era. The Francis of “the early 1900s” gives way to the Francis of “postwar prosperity” and the “hippie saint,” and then to a contemporary “blessing of the animals” Francis (31, 89, 110, 136). The chapters reveal that, at any given moment, competing interpretations of Francis (some major, some minor) abound. Appelbaum argues that, throughout U.S. history, people with disparate interests and concerns have found a Francis to relate to. “Artist, poet, clown; traveler, camper, farmer; leper, street person, prisoner: the list goes on and on” (181). Because Francis has “many dimensions,” he is easy to appropriate as a saint who reflects the dominant “cultural preoccupations” of a historical moment (181, 4). But Francis is also—Appelbaum goes on to argue—a perennial inspiration for individuals who think counter-culturally, who resist the status quo. And so images of Francis also “often represent alternatives to historical conditions—alternatives to the cultural preoccupations of their times” (4). Francis is therefore at once the statue gracing the lavish early twentieth-century Connecticut estate, and the radical model for the emergent “underground church” and ecology movements of the late sixties and early seventies (121). His doubled quality—Francis as cultural sanctifier/Francis as cultural critic— has given the saint his staying power. Appelbaum does a remarkable job of teasing out this doubled nature; the book tenaciously tracks popular expressions associated with Francis in the many directions they lead. For example, Appelbaum follows the now ubiquitous, Francis-attributed “peace prayer” as it circulates, from Reader's Digest magazine to Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, from Alcoholics Anonymous to the Summer of Love in San Francisco. This sort of careful work, which demonstrates not only how Francis became both cultural and counter-cultural, but also how tenuous the distinction between culture and counter-culture ultimately is, is the book's great strength.

St. Francis of America also makes a significant, if understated, contribution to historical scholarship on Protestant-Catholic relations in the United States. While the author's account of nineteenth-century Protestant interest in Francis offers a new chapter in the well-known “fear-and-fascination” narrative introduced by Jenny Franchot, the most interesting moment in Appelbaum's history comes in the early twentieth century. In chapter four (“Hymn, Prayer, and Garden”), Appelbaum begins her work of charting the peace prayer's circulation. Originally printed in European Catholic sources (including a Vatican newspaper), the prayer was appearing in Protestant and “generalist” prayer books, and even in House and Garden magazine, by the early 1940s (71–72). In Appelbaum's presentation, the peace prayer stands as a fascinating case study in ecumenical exchange during an era—the decades preceding the Second Vatican Council—in which U.S. Catholicism is most often remembered for its insular devotional culture.

Early in the book, Appelbaum explains her use of sources: “In order to study popular public appropriations of St. Francis,” she writes, “I wanted to begin with sources that were available to a wide public” (6). To this end, her sources include popular periodicals, novels and films, biographies, prayer books, and hymnals. In addition, in chapter eight (“Living Voices”), Appelbaum incorporates survey responses to construct “in a fine-grained way, some of the ways in which contemporary Americans relate to St. Francis” (168). Despite this useful variety, it is worth noting the perspectives that remain unrepresented, or underrepresented, in Appelbaum's sources. Appelbaum's subjects—the people who are imagining St. Francis of America, in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—are almost exclusively Euro-Americans. The book could do more to highlight ways in which other, non-Euro-American constructions of Francis have tangled with, and informed, this Francis of the American imagination. I live and work in New Mexico, a region where Franciscan missions left an oversized footprint. Today the U.S. Southwest has not only streets and buildings named after Francis, but also a thriving Hispanic art market and a tourism economy that capitalize on his image. Francis is familiar to Catholics and non-Catholics here alike, but for reasons that diverge from Appelbaum's analysis. Francis's memory is similarly alive in California, via the legacies of the missions there. It is striking that the city of San Francisco, while Francis's namesake, remains outside of Appelbaum's story until Anglo artists and hippies descend on it in the twentieth century. Appelbaum makes the important point that “social construction need not always serve the powerful. It can also be a way in which ordinary or marginalized people create meaning” (6). The author has laid a strong foundation in St. Francis of America for thinking about the social construction of Francis of Assisi in the United States. I hope future scholars will build on this foundation to further consider the contributions of “ordinary or marginalized people,” in the U.S. West and elsewhere, to the Francis of the American imagination (6).