A sad and painful but bravely told story. Acknowledging his son’s mistakes and hoping things will change, the author...
A father’s nightmarish account of the Church of Scientology’s transformation into a “coercive” cult under the authoritarian leadership of his son, David Miscavige.
Musician Ron Miscavige, now 80, broke with Scientology in 2012 after more than four decades as a member, nearly 30 of them as a staffer at the church’s base near Hemet, California, where he composed and arranged music for films and videos. This insider’s memoir, published despite a threatened lawsuit for libel—and so explosive that even its sometimes cliché-ridden sentences do not interfere with compulsive reading—confirms allegations of wrongdoing made familiar to many by the book and HBO exposé Going Clear. David rose to power after church founder L. Ron Hubbard’s 1986 death and soon displayed a burgeoning “mean streak and ruthless ways” that turned an organization dedicated to world betterment into a “manipulative, coercive, and…evil” group aimed at “strong-arming people out of their money.” After describing David’s happy childhood in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town, the author explains how a chance encounter led the family to join Scientology: David’s asthma improved, and the author found himself better able to manage his difficult first marriage. But bright, hardworking David changed drastically as the head of the church. The author speculates that David’s habit of denigrating Scientology members may trace back to childhood when, occasionally bullied over his diminutive size, he would pick fights with classmates. Whatever the reason, David has “become corrupt” as chairman of the church, rebuking members, giving brutal tongue-lashings, “nullifying” people, demanding they work to the brink of exhaustion, and isolating offenders in “The Hole.” Indeed, writes the author, David exhibits the characteristics of a sociopath. The elder Miscavige was treated routinely in a “demeaning” manner. On leaving the church, he says, he was “disconnected”—Scientologists, including his two daughters, may no longer communicate with him—and followed by detectives.
A sad and painful but bravely told story. Acknowledging his son’s mistakes and hoping things will change, the author concludes, “David, I forgive you.”Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-09693-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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