A captivating story of one woman’s journey to spiritual freedom.
In a compelling debut memoir, Larkin tells of her experiences in the Children of God cult.
Growing up in the Bible Belt in the 1970s, Larkin was drawn to Christianity at a young age. However, her mother always actively discouraged her from joining a church and leading a religious life. When her mother finally took her to a church, Larkin found herself dissatisfied: “The people were nice to me, but they didn’t talk much about the Lord. They seemed more interested in talking about what was right and wrong—not a whole lot different than my mother.” Lost and despondent, the 13-year-old Larkin happened upon a poster in the nearby college town of Knoxville, Tenn., that read, “Free Food, Free Music, Free Love.” Larkin took the ad as a sign from God and went to the listed address, where she was greeted by the seemingly warm and generous members of the Children of God, also known as the Family. Larkin joined them and eagerly relinquished all her possessions to the group. The Family’s regular proselytizing, or “witnessing,” consisted at first of distributing leaflets and singing on street corners, but then began incorporating “Flirty Fishing,” in which female members persuaded outsiders to join the Family by flirting and eventually sleeping with them. Larkin’s spiritual journey took another unexpected turn when she gave birth to a daughter, Berta, with cerebral palsy. Her challenges as she tried to raise Berta in the Family—where no one member is allowed to receive special treatment—led Larkin to see her life in the Children of God as unsustainable and detrimental to her and her daughter’s well-being. In this fine memoir, the author’s voice is emotional and fervent, but her prose style is relatively unadorned. She conveys her story in simple but powerful language that consistently makes her account an absorbing read.
A captivating story of one woman’s journey to spiritual freedom.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478326069
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
