A provocative yet unfocused glimpse into resistance to predators hiding behind religion.
An exploration of the vast array of online communities “questioning some of the impacts of evangelicalism’s ascendant effects.”
In her wide-ranging debut, journalist Stankorb chronicles the many ways in which American women raised as evangelicals have used the internet as a tool to expose examples of sexual abuse and other deep-seated problems in the churches in which they grew up. Examining blogs written primarily in the 1990s, the author crafts a “snapshot in time” of how the newly powerful internet allowed people—particularly women—who were otherwise isolated and often nearly powerless to reach others who shared their experiences to unite and reveal problems within evangelical churches. Prominent in the narrative, which relies on extensive interviews with those who call themselves “exvangelicals,” are stories of abuse by youth pastors in Southern Baptist churches around the country as well as the influential Maryland megachurch the Covenant Life Church. As horrifying as the abuse are the accounts of its systematic coverup and attempts to shame those who eventually dared to report abuse. Many of Stankorb's subjects grew up in a world of purity rings, restrictive home schooling, and “stay at home daughterhood,” where they were expected to follow orders from the men in their life even after reaching adulthood. This makes their choices to speak out even more striking. Stankorb unevenly weaves in stories of her own life, growing up in a mildly religious family headed by an alcoholic and sometimes abusive father. While she effectively recounts the individual struggles within particular churches, she is less successful with broader themes. The narrative occasionally becomes mired in anecdotes about the many people she interviewed and the infighting among the members of the movements that grew up in opposition to evangelical churches. Still, the author’s message is worth hearing.
A provocative yet unfocused glimpse into resistance to predators hiding behind religion.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781546003809
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Worthy/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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