A gripping narrative perfect for those seeking more information after reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear.
A high-profile former Scientology member tells the story of how she came to terms with her homosexuality and found the courage to leave the organization.
Oklahoma native LeClair first came into contact with Scientology after her mother took a consulting job with a management firm that encouraged her to take Scientology “self-improvement courses.” Soon she was encouraging her 17-year-old daughter to forgo her plans for college and work full-time at her company. Pressured from the start to join Scientology, the author finally began sessions with a Scientologist minister after a traumatic car crash. She then underwent “Security Checks” to determine her fitness for Scientology membership, during which she obliquely admitted to having experienced same-sex attraction. To move out of what Scientologists called “Lower Conditions” that would impede her spiritual progress, LeClair was tasked with finding a boyfriend. So she married a man she helped convert to Scientology three years later. The author struggled in private with both her sexuality and an abusive marriage, but she thrived professionally, “making money hand over fist” in the insurance industry while serving as volunteer president of the church’s Youth for Human Rights organization. Though she was a poster child for Scientology, her relationship to the church soured when she tried to divorce her husband. A generous donor, it was only after LeClair had spent large sums on useless “auditing”—the church equivalent of therapy—and threatened to withhold future funds that she was able to divorce. Then she fell in love with another woman and became the target of a Scientology “Black Propaganda campaign” designed to ruin her and her business. An unrepentant LeClair left Scientology in 2011, but her nightmarish battle, which included protracted legal wrangling over accusations of fraud, would not be over for years. As courageous as it is honest, the author’s tell-all book offers disturbing insights into the inner workings of a church that is as controversial as ever.
A gripping narrative perfect for those seeking more information after reading Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-99116-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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