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
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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