Offers a glimpse into the oft-shadowy world of a Christian cult.
In his second memoir, interspersed with details on escaping a religious cult, Hall reminds readers that religion ought to be about love and compassion and brutality and anger has no place among true Christians.
In his first book, Betrayal and Escape (2000), Hall (DDS) detailed his and his brother’s escape from the Roberts Religion, an ultraconservative religious cult, of which his mother was the leader. In this follow-up, the author goes deeper into the abuse he and his brother suffered at his mother’s hands–cruelty she heaped upon her adopted children, purportedly in God’s name. Scattered among the tales of oppression are biblical quotes he uses to directly contradict his mother’s teachings. Where she taught of a religion based on fear and xenophobia, Hall knew there was another Christianity out there–a religion he would not truly know until he found the courage to escape from his mother’s domination. However, this is not merely a reminiscence of escape. Like the Christianity with which he ultimately found solace, On Wings of Eagles is concerned with redemption. In his mother’s later days, she found the courage to apologize for her actions in his childhood, and he found the capacity to forgive. Like most autobiographies, the reader only gets access to one perspective–making the description of the Roberts Religion naturally biased. The author seems quick to ascribe all of his mother’s faults to the actions of Satan. Many memoirs blur the line between straight-talk and self-pity, and the book comes close to, but never actually crosses that line. Hall’s writing style is simple and direct, a solid method to recount his story. While some secular readers might be put off by the included biblical passages, the heart of the narrative–finding the courage to escape the only life you’ve ever known–is universal.
Offers a glimpse into the oft-shadowy world of a Christian cult.Pub Date: April 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2534-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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