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Adults

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Authors, History & Genealogy

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Join the Echo Park Historical Society for a presentation by author Claire Hoffman about her book Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson – a new biography of the pioneering evangelist who rose to stardom in Los Angeles in the 1920s and founded the still-active Foursquare Church headquartered at the Angelus Temple, an Echo Park landmark just a block from the library.

Famed for her religious mission, Aimee Semple McPherson was equally notorious for the bizarre story of her disappearance and reappearance in 1926. On a spring day, Aimee Semple McPherson, then one of the biggest media personalities in Southern California, seemingly wandered into the Pacific Ocean and vanished. Weeks later she reappeared in the desert, claiming to have been kidnapped. The story of what followed—sex scandals, religious persecution, legal shenanigans, the seemingly unshakable faith of thousands of followers, and the race by the media to cover it all—runs through the heart of this book.

McPherson was a sophisticated marketer who used spectacle, storytelling, and the newest technology to bring God’s message to the masses. Her innovations brought Pentecostalism into the mainstream, paved the way for televangelists, and shaped the future of American Christianity. But after her disappearance, people asked: Was McPherson everybody’s saintly sister, or a con-artist sinner? Told with the flavor of the period’s noir mysteries, Sister, Sinner takes us on a riveting journey into the rise of popular religion in America and explores the hidden life of one of its most intriguing practitioners.

Claire Hoffman has written for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker, and is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of California, Riverside. Her first book was Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood, a memoir based on her experiences growing up in the Transcendental Meditation movement in Fairfield, Iowa.

Stories Books will have copies available to be purchased and signed by the author.

Email us at eden@lapl.org for more information.

For ADA accommodations, call (213) 228-7430 at least 72 hours prior to the event.

Para ajustes razonables según la ley de ADA, llama al (213) 228-7430 al menos 72 horas antes del evento.