Problematic but engaging participant observation.
Ivy League student spends three months immersed in an alien culture at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
Instead of cavorting through the major European capitals for a semester like many students his age, Roose shocked family and friends by enrolling at one of the nation’s most conservative Christian universities. After an attempt to interact honestly with his fundamentalist peers was met with awkward silence and resistance, Roose decided to go undercover, pretending to be a recently converted evangelical Christian in order to write about the reality of life on campus. To improve the ruse, he added his voice to the 300-strong Thomas Road Baptist Church choir, joined weekly Bible studies and one-on-one prayer sessions with his dorm buddies, and even traveled to Daytona Beach during spring break to evangelize on the frontlines. Reared in a liberal Quaker home, Roose had to develop a new body of knowledge, from Young Earth creationism to the trials and triumphs of “witnessing” for Jesus. Participation in this hyper-religious community of young people led him to identify more with his friends at Liberty, blurring the line between the writing project and his own faith. Therein lay the danger of his experiment: Roose lost much of his objectivity by drawing too close to the group he studied. Throughout the semester, he noted the progress of the transformation, but he chose to dwell on its positive aspects, such as an increasing sense of connection to God and the cherished realization that not all fundamentalist Christians are hate-mongering hypocrites. The climax of his semester was his interview of Falwell just days before his death. The author’s complex emotions about the interview and Falwell’s death signaled that, like it or not, his semester at Liberty had altered Roose’s way of thinking—though perhaps not permanently, as he was still a teenager at the time and would soon return to the über-liberal embrace of Brown University.
Problematic but engaging participant observation.Pub Date: March 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-17842-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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