An important wake-up call to people of faith.
Veteran journalist Lobdell provides a compelling account of his personal journey toward and then away from faith in God.
As a troubled young man, the author turned to religion as a way of finding meaning and order. His faith grew through involvement in a Protestant mega-church and eventually began to mature while attending a more traditional congregation. He spent years in personal turmoil as he attempted to find his spiritual place in the world. This quest led him to pursue, and in the fall of 2000 to attain, a job as religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Soon after, he received the first of many assignments connected to child molestation scandals within the Catholic Church. This was personally as well as professionally shocking, since Lobdell’s wife was a Catholic and he was in the process of becoming one. His reporting exposed a grim pattern: “Hypocrisy at all levels of the church, innocent people put in harm’s way by the church’s ‘shepherds,’ self-interest triumphing over Christian values, lies big and small and a general lack of courage among followers of Christ, especially those in power, would be recurrent subjects of my reporting.” Lobdell soon concluded that this pattern extended beyond Catholicism. He attended a conference of ex-Mormons who told of the harsh, unforgiving treatment they received in their Mormon-dominated communities. He investigated the evangelical Trinity Broadcasting Network, finding evidence of extensive financial and sexual misconduct. These discoveries drove the author away from his faith and toward the bottle. He struggled to blame human imperfection and organizational flaws for the evils he was investigating, but he could not escape the question of why God would permit such things to happen. Pursuing a particularly horrendous story about an Alaskan island on which virtually all the boys were sodomized by Catholic clergy, he finally reached an uncompromising answer: “What had happened to helpless boys at the edge of the world made a lot more sense if there were no God.” It’s not a cheerful conclusion, but Lobdell’s honesty and self-effacement make it persuasive.
An important wake-up call to people of faith.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-162681-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
