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
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
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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
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