A disquieting portrait of a religious community and its enigmatic leader.
A survivor of the government attack on the Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas, bears witness to the horrific event.
To coincide with a forthcoming miniseries about Waco, Thibodeau (A Place Called Waco, 1999) has updated his previous memoir, written with co-author Whiteson (A Terrible Beauty: An Exploration of the Positive Role of Violence in Culture, Life, and Society, 2010). The epilogue to this republication was written with the help of Whiteson’s widow. Thibodeau was a 21-year-old rock drummer when he met David Koresh in Los Angeles in 1990. “Not much in my life was going right,” he admits, so when Koresh invited him to join his Christian-oriented band, he readily agreed. Soon, he was invited to Waco, where he became fascinated by Koresh’s spiritual teachings. Koresh claimed that he had the key to decoding the Seven Seals; he himself “was the incarnation of the sacrificed Lamb” of the book of Revelation. As the leader of the hardscrabble community, he insisted on male celibacy: he alone was allowed to procreate, with any female—even girls of 12—“to generate the inner circle of children who would rule the coming kingdom to be established in Israel.” Although Thibodeau’s mother believed Koresh was skilled at “mind control” and “instilling extreme paranoia in his devotees,” Thibodeau defends the man who, he claims, changed his life for the better. Describing himself as a dreamer with no structure or direction for his life, with Koresh’s guidance, he learned to control his “appetites and impulses” and gained “some insight into a more profound way of being.” By 1993, the compound became the focus of government surveillance, fueled by testimony from disaffected members who had fled the community, claiming it was a dangerous cult peopled by “armed fanatics” brainwashed by a madman, guilty of gun stockpiling, child abuse, and statutory rape. Only the last charge, the author writes, could be supported. A violent, unjustified siege ended in a conflagration that killed 80 community members.
A disquieting portrait of a religious community and its enigmatic leader.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60286-573-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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