Affecting, if a touch long, and a deft portrait of the dangers of blindly following leaders of whatever stripe.
Goal-oriented, driven, and often betrayed, the author recounts time spent in the twin cults of centrifugal Christianity and the American military.
“The first rule of cults is you are never in a cult,” writes Mestyanek Young, who grew up in the communal world of the Children of God, led by a self-styled prophet who gathered a group of young followers whom he thought of “as sheep, in need of a shepherd.” Moving from country to country—Brazil, Mexico, Japan—a step ahead of the authorities, the group, as described by the author, was both strict in discipline and extremely free-wheeling in matters of sex, especially sex with minors. As a young teenager, the author broke free, attended college, and married at 21, briefly settling into a relationship that was problematic even years after her divorce. She also joined the U.S. Army, which had many of the cultish ingredients of her youth, especially the view that “as a woman, you’re either a bitch, a slut, or a dyke.” Even so, and despite her revulsion at superior officers’ defense of torture, Mestyanek Young excelled in leadership skills, working in intelligence in Afghanistan. “I was sure I could be a part of the army but not owned by it, that a person could have brains and independent, innovative thoughts” she writes, quickly adding, “I was wrong.” When she ran afoul of the command structure, her career ground to a halt. The author recounts her story in a series of episodes that become repetitive in the reading even as it’s clear that she was treated unjustly, at least by civilian standards. In the end, her message is compelling: A cult is a cult, she writes, and being a member makes it easy “to hate, harm, even kill because we are the good guys.”
Affecting, if a touch long, and a deft portrait of the dangers of blindly following leaders of whatever stripe.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-28011-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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