A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous (if not excessive) detail.
In this debut memoir, the author steps away from her religion, leading to both severe social consequences and personal fulfillment.
Curtis grew up in Portland in a family of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses. She was as faithful as could be, incessantly attending meetings and preaching to others, all while successfully pursuing a career at an American bank. She and her equally dedicated husband, Ross, lived happy, faithful lives together until a moment that changed everything. While proselyting, Curtis knocked on the door of a co-worker, and suddenly her message about the impending destruction of nonbelievers just didn’t ring true anymore. The author’s doubts festered and eventually led her to divorce both her husband and her faith. According to Jehovah’s Witnesses, only death or sexual relations with another person can officially end a marriage. Curtis had sex after her divorce, but she kept this to herself. After moving to Chicago, climbing the corporate career even further, and finding fulfillment in other belief systems, she took the final step of confessing her sexual encounters and apostasy to her family and church leaders. The official shunning commenced and has continued to this day, only temporarily suspended for funerals. Curtis has organized her thoughts well and expresses them clearly and entertainingly. No detail of her spiritual, social, and professional journey, however, is too small to share, which stalls momentum. Still, the author’s radical transformation—from dogmatism to relativism and from timidity to self-assurance—unfolds gradually and genuinely. Beyond providing an eye-opening look at her former religious community, this memoir subtly encourages readers to challenge childhood views in search of chosen beliefs.
A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous (if not excessive) detail.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-328-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 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
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
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