A febrile hit job, more polemical than analytical.
A spirited critique of Mormonism as a religion and Mitt Romney as a political leader.
Debut author Erickson argues that Mitt Romney is a species of religiously directed Manchurian candidate, a brainwashed dupe slavishly beholden to the Mormon church’s elders. The author splits her analysis into a critique of Mormonism as a religion and an exposé of the church’s and Romney’s nefarious political commitments. The first part begins with a brief history of the Mormon church aimed at revealing both its sordid past and unpalatable doctrinal commitments, including the racist denigration of both blacks and Jews. The author’s principal criticism of the church is its inquisitional intolerance. It demands the utter subjugation of its members and brooks no dissent. And since Romney is utterly devoted to the Mormon faith, his election to president, she believes, is tantamount to an election of his church superiors: “Maybe not willingly my friend, but if you elect Mitt Romney as president of this nation, you will likely be following the prophet he follows because the decisions Mitt Romney will make for this country, in all likelihood, will be directly based upon the prophet and the teachings of his faith.” Erickson attacks Romney exhaustively, assessing his financial dealings, his political campaigns, his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, and the extent to which he remains faithful to professed conservative principles. She writes from the perspective of a conservative in favor of limited government and against both abortion and government-run health care. Erickson grew up within the Mormon faith, and her knowledge of its history and guiding beliefs is impressively comprehensive. Her prose, however, is breathlessly strident—she calls Romney a “hollow shell of a man”—and abounds with conspiratorial paranoia and immoderate hyperbole. Most importantly, though, her arguments are largely unconvincing. Many of the criticisms she makes of the Mormon church regarding its checkered past, theological inconsistency, doctrinal dogmatism, and institutional dysfunction could just as legitimately be made of the Catholic Church, which she seems to favor. And her argument that Romney is insufficiently pro-life seems incompatible with her fear that he’s blindly devoted to his faith.
A febrile hit job, more polemical than analytical.Pub Date: June 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4497-1200-6
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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