A rightly disturbing record of malignant child neglect by people who sought a heaven, but made a hell.
British journalist Guest recalls the toll taken by his childhood in a commune devoted to the teachings of notorious Indian guru Bhagwan Rajneesh.
Torn between her conflicting desires for ecstasy and paradise, the author’s mother moved from devout Catholicism as a child to Marxism, feminism, and eventually a Bhagwan commune. She never married Guest’s father, an academic who later relocated to teach in California, and was a loving but troubled mother. In 1979, when Tim was three, she heard a tape of the guru talking “about joy, about bliss, about an end to fear and pain.” She became increasingly involved with Bhagwan’s British acolytes, went to India to meet him, then took her six-year-old son with her when she joined an ashram outside Bombay. From then until the late 1980s (when Bhagwan fled an indictment in the US, and his followers fell apart), Guest’s life was controlled by the cult. He poignantly describes a world turned upside down, a world in which the adults behaved like children, following their bliss with unlimited sex and drugs (until the Bhagwan became obsessed with AIDS) while their neglected offspring struggled to raise themselves and take care of one another. Guest movingly details a lonely childhood spent at communes in London, Devon, India, Oregon, and Germany. His mother moved frequently and performed exhausting manual work as she strove to obey the sect’s increasingly draconian dictates. He missed having her come to say goodnight to him, cuddle him, or read to him. He wanted to be with a parent, not a group, and he resented the numerous rules: obligatory worship, restricted diet, confiscation of his books and stuffed animals. Adolescence was rocky, though by then his mother had grown disillusioned with the Bhagwan, who once owned 93 Rolls Royces, lots of expensive jewelry, and 21 assault rifles.
A rightly disturbing record of malignant child neglect by people who sought a heaven, but made a hell.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-603106-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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