An offbeat but engaging exploration of the religious right from a self-described radical lesbian. Minkowitz already has a gem of a reputation among the religious right for her famous 1995 Ms. article, where she posed as a teenage boy to get the scoop on the Promise Keepers. In this book (her first), the Village Voice reporter infiltrates other bastions of evangelicalism, including Focus on the Family, the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, and Grace ‘N Vessels, —a kaffeeklatsch of Christian women.— But Minkowitz’s insinuations shun the facile genre of exposÇ for a more subtle and more personally revealing give-and-take. At Promise Keepers, she is moved by the tender affection that men are permitted, for once, to demonstrate to other men and by the participants— anguished admissions of their relational failures. At its core, though, this is a book about sex, about the unbridled passion that simultaneously fascinates and repels the religious right. At the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (a group whose worship is so spontaneous and radical that it has been removed from its parent denomination), Minkowitz observes how the language of worshipers casts God as an angry, abusive lover, a theme that is repeated often throughout the book. In many evangelical circles, the worshiper’s relationship with God is portrayed as almost explicitly sexual: —can—t nobody do me like Jesus,— as one little girl says proudly. Minkowitz interweaves several chapters on organizations in the gay rights movement, including Sex Panic! and the S/M Leather Fetish Celebration. What she discovers through these implicit comparisons is that the radical right is a lot more like the radical left than it is different from it—especially regarding sex. She claims that both groups obsess about conquering sin (which S/M people call —violence—). Told with great humor and also—yes, really—love. As Minkowitz brazenly tells three white men from Focus, —I really love you guys. But I just really hate your sin!—
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83322-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© 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.
