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
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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