A must-read for anyone seeking to understand how cults operate and view themselves in relation to the world.
Page-turning account of growing up at the heart of a fringe religion.
The Church Universal and Triumphant, which Prophet estimates to have had 40,000 followers worldwide at its peak, was an offshoot of earlier New Age movements combining Christian teachings, Eastern religious concepts and the channeling of messages from “ascended masters.” Starting in the early 1970s, the author’s mother, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, was at the center of the church and wielded autocratic power over her followers. Best known for ordering hundreds of adherents into underground Montana shelters in preparation for a prophesied nuclear war, the church and the Prophet family were often in the news during the early ’90s. Viewed as a spiritual heir-apparent, the author was encouraged to take up her mother’s mantel as a seer and visionary; she took on an increasingly active role in the church’s decisions, though often behind the scenes. Elizabeth Prophet’s control over her daughter’s life was complete, even down to how often she spent the night with her husband. Over time, a series of insights into her mother’s imperfections, from moral peccadilloes to frail and failing health, opened Prophet’s eyes to the inconsistencies in her teachings, leading in the end to the author’s independence. Looking back, Prophet dispassionately explores not only the cult but also her role in its day-to-day activities. Her memoir is lucidly written and entirely approachable, providing all the necessary background for understanding the story without belaboring New Age history. The author puts to good use her training as a sociologist in a text that demonstrates close reflection without wandering into self-pity or false excuses.
A must-read for anyone seeking to understand how cults operate and view themselves in relation to the world.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59921-425-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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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