An impressive religious memoir—candid and inspiring without being sensationalistic or self-pitying.
A debut book focuses on a young girl growing up in the infamous Children of God cult and the bizarre locales that she was raised in.
Edwards’ memoir chronicles her upbringing in the religious movement the Children of God, also called the Family, a doomsday cult formed in the late 1960s by David Berg. Berg prophesied a looming apocalypse, claiming it would occur in 1993. Often in hiding, he sent letters to instruct his followers, with the prophet encouraging an atmosphere of wanton sexuality and constant ministry, interspersed with tales of his alleged erotic conquests to offset his own impotency. From a young age, Edwards had her doubts about the “evil” that the walls around the family’s residences supposedly protected her from as well as a great fear that her life would end in martyrdom. Much of the early years of her and her twin sister, Tamar, was spent in Thailand, staying in overcrowded conditions while their parents did “outreach” work, which often meant begging. The book delivers another account of the Children of God, whose history of incest and sexualization of minor-age children has become notorious since the 2005 murder-suicide committed by former cult member Ricky “Davidito” Rodriguez in the U.S. Rodriguez killed an associate of his mother’s and then took his own life. Edwards’ experiences portray a different yet no less oppressive Family half a world away. The author will not be a stranger to some readers, having been extensively interviewed, and she brings the same presence and charisma to her memoir. The narrative is vivid, from its depictions of the blood of her mother’s first miscarriage to the constant dust and grime of life near the Mekong River. The moving story carries a muted, often dark sense of humor, with a wry sense of timing. Edwards’ shock at forgetting to minister to a brawny Russian who hoisted her above a deep freezer in Thailand (“Wanna feel cold?”) is one particularly endearing and startling case. But the author’s years of awakening after her family’s exit from the Children of God, while not rushed, feel abbreviated. The accounts of her realization that she grew up in a cult, ranging from a story in Seventeen to her teenage rebellion and even her attempted suicide, are presented with a self-awareness and charm that will make readers want more.
An impressive religious memoir—candid and inspiring without being sensationalistic or self-pitying.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68336-769-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Turner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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