A worthy, clearly written account of a movement and its downfall.
A history professor recounts and updates the scandals revolving around the PTL Club and its guiding lights, evangelical preachers Jim Bakker and his then-wife, Tammy Faye Bakker.
In this deeply researched combination of recent history and biography, Wigger (History/Univ. of Missouri; American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists, 2009, etc.) builds on a number of historical threads from the 1970s and ’80s, when the Bakkers were first famous—as well as vastly and ostentatiously wealthy—and then infamous due to the PTL Club, their televised “religious” enterprise. (PTL stands for either Praise the Lord or People that Love.) The author’s main themes are hubris and greed as well as financial fraud, sexual exploitation, phony religion, the siren song of celebrity, and the dangers of the prosperity gospel. Wigger acknowledges the far-reaching investigation during the 1980s by Charles E. Shepard, a Charlotte Observer reporter who wrote Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry (1989). In many ways, Wigger’s book serves as a skilled, informative update of Shepard’s exposé. Tammy Faye Bakker is now dead, but Jim Bakker is back after serving five years in prison for multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. He has remarried and is now running an enterprise called Morningside, which serves people who want to buy supplies for a predicted apocalypse. One of the most damning parts of the book concerns Jessica Hahn, a young admirer of Bakker who was raped by the preacher and a colleague, and the horrifying detail provided by the author remains as upsetting as it was when originally disclosed. The Bakkers started out with good intentions when they chose to become itinerant preachers, but the monsters they became make it difficult to feel any sympathy for them despite Wigger’s thoughtful presentation. Many of the other high-profile evangelicals in the book—including Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggart, and Pat Robertson—also inspire very little admiration.
A worthy, clearly written account of a movement and its downfall.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-937971-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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