Despite the uneven prose, readers with an interest in the psychology of religion, among other subjects, will find this rare...
An ex-member of Scientology’s inner elite bolts—understandably, to trust this undistinguished but still valuable memoir.
If Charles Dickens had been a sci-fi author, he might have dreamed up something like Scientology and its weird workhouses. Hill, born to parents who had been longtime members of sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard’s organization, and whose uncle is now its de facto leader, recounts a life resolutely within the realm of the thetans. “Everyone I knew was in the Church, and as a third-generation Scientologist, my life was Scientology,” she writes. That life included absolute obedience to dictates that seem crafted to strip away any autonomy from the individual, if any individuality at all. At the age of 4, Hill was already an adept, while her parents were members of “Sea Org,” the inner sanctum; one requirement was that families be separated and that “children over the age of six would be raised communally at locations close to Sea Org bases.” Family visits dwindled, and Hill scarcely saw her mother unless on “special Scientology/Sea Org occasions…[when] I would get to see her for a whole day.” Hill’s break from the sect in 2005, after years of control, coincided with the publication of an unauthorized bio of Tom Cruise, perhaps its best-known member, which she found to be accurate. Hill’s emotional turmoil is wrenchingly authentic, but even the help of well-credentialed writer Pulitzer (co-author: Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church, 2013, etc.) does not save the book from a limping prose style full of expressions such as “incredibly special” and “I got pretty emotional that Dallas’s family was there to make it special.”
Despite the uneven prose, readers with an interest in the psychology of religion, among other subjects, will find this rare insider’s account to be of value—less so than Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear (2013), but of value all the same.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-224847-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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