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static microphone. Because of the physical restraints of the microphone, a more reserved and less emotionally engaged ideal of charismatic speech came into vogue starting in the 1920s and continuing into the 1940s. Although Young’s work is otherwise brilliantly argued, original, and deeply relevant to a number of different disciplines, his decline narrative limits its potential impact. In The Age of Charisma, Young offers a compelling narrative of one part of the larger history of charismatic movements in American history. It is unclear whether Young intends to suggest that there was only one “Age of Charisma,” because throughout thework Young describes the phenomenon he is studying as both a state of being (“charisma” as an adjective) and as a distinct entity (“charisma” as a proper noun). There were, after all, many influential charismatic speakers before and after Young’s charismatic era of the 1880s to the 1920s in the United States, such as abolitionists (before the Civil War) and birth control advocates (speaking charismatically during and after the “Age of Charisma”). Indeed, antebellum reformers of all stripes who spoke on lecture circuits, built cults of personality, and studied public speaking were also influenced by Benjamin Rush. Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among many others, were known for exceptionally emotionally engaging charismatic performances. Moreover, as Young notes, the subdued styles of radio personalities were “charismatic” in their own way to many listeners in the 1920s and 1930s (p. 222). Young’s work, read with attention to his applications of the word “charisma,” has fascinating interdisciplinary implications, especially for historians of reform and religion. From the perspective of religious studies, Young’s charismatic speakers may be understood as saints (some affiliated with religious denominations, others not), emanating metaphysical healing power. This has massive implications for the burgeoning literature on the blurred boundaries between the secular and the religious. As he has essentially reconstructed a shared religious and secular tradition of charisma and sainthood, Young’s work offers fascinating grounds for comparisons of hero and saint worship, for example, contextualizing the recent literature comparing how Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln became remembered as almost superhuman figures emanating virtue. Moreover, his work will be of interest to historians of radical and reform movements in the nineteenth-century U.S., as it shows how both movements shared many of the same metaphors and built on many of the same traditions. Young’s chapters on the development of the “charismatic tradition” and his discussions of the Second Great Awakening directly and usefully link antebellum with post-Civil War reform traditions. Certainly, in The Age of Charisma, Jeremy Young successfully shows that through charismatic public speaking, we can reform individuals, and, through them, society.