An engaging memoir that will inevitably make readers long for a more equal future.
In a sharp and shocking debut memoir, Conley digs deep into the ex-gay therapy system.
When the author’s parents found out he might be gay, his hometown in Arkansas started to close in on him. The community he grew up in looked at him twice, his principles were blurred by constant self-doubt, and those he once considered friends became distant memories. As people of faith, his parents sent him to Love in Action, a Christian ministry devoted to “curing” those filled with “sin.” “According to the scripture,” writes Conley, “I was no better than a pedophile, or an idol worshiper, or a murderer.” While attending LIA, the author met others struggling with alcoholism, homosexuality, and suicidal ideation, and he was told repeatedly that his inner life was wrong. It needed to be changed for the sake of a higher being Conley wasn’t sure existed anymore. During college, writes the author, the liberal teachings he received constantly clashed with everything he learned growing up. “Sitting there in the midst of my professors’ intelligent conversations, I had felt like both an impostor and a traitor,” he writes. “I smiled at the appropriate moments, made droll comments about my upbringing, mocked the politics of almost everyone in my hometown. Yet it was also true that coming home often made me feel, if not proud of my heritage, then at least grateful for its familiarity.” Those moments of disjunction are unfortunately not frequent in the book though they are absolutely vital to this framework. Readers follow Conley through a very difficult process of self-identification that sheds light on the degrees of intolerance that are still present in today’s world. At times, the text feels a bit passive; some readers may expect more blatant outrage. Nevertheless, Conley has chosen to expose ex-gay therapy as abusive, and that is important.
An engaging memoir that will inevitably make readers long for a more equal future.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-301-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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