A frank, in-depth account of one woman’s struggles in a controlling organization.
An author recounts her experiences with the religious group The Way International in this debut memoir.
Although Edge was raised Roman Catholic, she drifted from the religion as a teenager. Following the loss of her mother to cancer, she had questions about God that Catholicism seemed unable to answer. After participating in a Young Life camp and other flirtations with Protestantism, she came across some young men at East Carolina University who claimed to have something stronger. They were representatives of The Way International, a group founded by Victor Paul Wierwille, whose aim was to present the Bible in a way that “would reveal the original, noncontradictory, error-free Scriptures that God authored.” It was with The Way that the author’s life would change completely. From dropping out of college to becoming part of The Way Corps to marrying another member, she would spend years immersed in what many, including Edge, would consider a cult. Although The Way claimed to be an organization aimed at researching and spreading the original message of the Bible, the author argues that it was really a group that embraced the whims of its often moody leader: “This wasn’t a church where people attended only once a week, but a thriving family with a common cause.” It is easy to see from Edge’s account what might attract one to such a family, despite warnings from others. While a variety of controversies ended up surrounding The Way, the author’s most astute portrayal concerns her participation in its research branch. As she and others worked to translate old biblical texts, it became clear to her that the only interpretation that mattered was the one that had been decided by Wierwille. After all, his whole claim of authority came from his notion of “a perfect Bible.” Scenes of disagreements among researchers might not be as salacious as accusations of sexual misconduct within the group (which Edge mentions, though she did not experience it firsthand). But the clashes pointedly illustrate the contradictions at the heart of such an institution. If a research branch denies its own findings due to the will of one man, then surely trouble is afoot.
A frank, in-depth account of one woman’s struggles in a controlling organization.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9978747-0-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: New Wings Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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