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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
