A moving and multivoiced account of a fundamentalist Christian family embracing a gay son.
A deeply religious couple cope with their son coming out as gay.
In this slim autobiographical book, Cliff Self (Man UP, 2009), a father and former fundamentalist Christian pastor, recounts living a normal, contented life when his son one day confronted him and his wife with a shocking revelation: He was gay. The author makes the tricky but ultimately successful narrative decision to tell the story from three points of view, including his wife, debut author Darlene Self, and his son, debut author Scott Self. Scott’s own memories of growing up a deeply closeted and even self-denying young gay man are the book’s most involving segments (“I truly believe growing up in the nineties was a blessing beyond compare, no social media, no cell phones and no Wi-Fi,” he writes at one point. “They were the last of low-tech glory days and a perfect hiding place for a blossoming gay boy like myself”). But Cliff and Darlene’s recollections are likewise very moving. (At one point after the disclosure, Darlene stresses: “Above all, I did not want Scott to disappear from my world through all his hurt and pain.”) The sections narrated by Scott take readers through his deepening discovery of his own sexuality as well as his mounting struggles with drug addiction and the long, slow process of recovery and acceptance. Cliff’s own reflections on that experience cause the book’s biggest problems. He stresses that the “overriding message of Jesus is love,” which is admirable, but he also writes that he was “unable to find any clearly stated directive in the Bible to restrict or ostracize gay people.” Since Romans 1:26-27 is widely interpreted as a clear biblical instruction to shun gay individuals, this passage receives a significant amount of special attention and pleading on Cliff’s part. (He eventually settles on controversially asserting that St. Paul is “writing about the Gentile people who did not honor God but worshipped God’s creation.”) Still, these minor fumbles at justifying gay acceptance are outweighed by the work’s strong message of family love conquering all obstacles.
A moving and multivoiced account of a fundamentalist Christian family embracing a gay son.Pub Date: March 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6960-4
Page Count: 126
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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