Despite the uneven prose, readers with an interest in the psychology of religion, among other subjects, will find this rare...
An ex-member of Scientology’s inner elite bolts—understandably, to trust this undistinguished but still valuable memoir.
If Charles Dickens had been a sci-fi author, he might have dreamed up something like Scientology and its weird workhouses. Hill, born to parents who had been longtime members of sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard’s organization, and whose uncle is now its de facto leader, recounts a life resolutely within the realm of the thetans. “Everyone I knew was in the Church, and as a third-generation Scientologist, my life was Scientology,” she writes. That life included absolute obedience to dictates that seem crafted to strip away any autonomy from the individual, if any individuality at all. At the age of 4, Hill was already an adept, while her parents were members of “Sea Org,” the inner sanctum; one requirement was that families be separated and that “children over the age of six would be raised communally at locations close to Sea Org bases.” Family visits dwindled, and Hill scarcely saw her mother unless on “special Scientology/Sea Org occasions…[when] I would get to see her for a whole day.” Hill’s break from the sect in 2005, after years of control, coincided with the publication of an unauthorized bio of Tom Cruise, perhaps its best-known member, which she found to be accurate. Hill’s emotional turmoil is wrenchingly authentic, but even the help of well-credentialed writer Pulitzer (co-author: Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church, 2013, etc.) does not save the book from a limping prose style full of expressions such as “incredibly special” and “I got pretty emotional that Dallas’s family was there to make it special.”
Despite the uneven prose, readers with an interest in the psychology of religion, among other subjects, will find this rare insider’s account to be of value—less so than Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear (2013), but of value all the same.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-224847-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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