An intriguing, if somewhat uneven, look at an esoteric religious sect.
A writer recounts his childhood in a black Hebrew Israelite sect in this memoir.
Rabii (The Poems of Robin R. Rabii, 2016) was born in 1958 to African-American parents who had recently joined a new religious sect called the Helion Temple of Ancient Divine Wisdom—Order of Melchisedec. The physical temple at the center of this close-knit religious community was the center of his life: “I spent more hours in the Temple than in my own home.…My world was the Temple and there were very few activities in my young life that were separate from it.” As the author explains, the centrality of this faith in the life of his family had lasting consequences on his development: some positive, but many quite negative. As Rabii writes, the eclectic beliefs of the Order, which mixed Afrocentrism and elements of Judaism with more occult and New-Age teachings, informed his spiritual development. But the immense power of its founder—who was known as Mother or the Queen—and the cultic zealotry of her followers led to emotional and physical abuse, particularly against the children of the Order. According to the author, beatings, forced fasting, and threats of damnation were common means of control used by the Queen and her enforcers. So great was this abuse that Rabii eventually left the religion, though he details it now in order to shed light on this curious sect that remains active even to this day. Rabii’s prose is generally amicable, even when discussing the darker aspects of the Order’s behavior: “The next question you must be scratching your head about is why adults would allow themselves to be abused by others? And perhaps more importantly, why would parents accept the abuse of their children?” The book, which includes historical photographs, does not have the narrative structure or propulsive pace of the typical survivor memoir. At nearly 500 pages, including appendices, it’s a bit bloated (and this is only Book 1). But as a repository of information about this obscure religion, the work is invaluable. Readers interested in fringe religious movements and the ways cults take advantage of their members should find the Order to be a particularly absorbing case.
An intriguing, if somewhat uneven, look at an esoteric religious sect.Pub Date: March 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984297-90-7
Page Count: 488
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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