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 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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