A heartfelt and richly detailed memoir.
A religious and political activist tells the story of how she grew up in and then left the extremist Westboro Baptist Church.
As the granddaughter of the church founder, Phelps-Roper grew up in a large, tightly knit family that believed “God ruled via the parents and elders.” What that meant in practice was that she had to assimilate a church culture emphasizing “the celebration and mockery” of the tragedies that befell nonbelievers. Throughout childhood and adolescence, Phelps-Roper lived a double life. At school, she was a dedicated student who kept matters of faith out of her discussions with teachers and classmates. Outside of school, she and the members of her church community were vocal protesters against homosexuality, adultery, and the morally bankrupt nature of society. When Westboro's “picketing ministry” brought it into the media spotlight, Phelps-Roper became one of the most visible spokespeople for the church. As a young adult, she traveled all over the country to show “that the Bible really did say what [the Westboro Church] claimed it did.” By 2011, she became her church’s voice on Twitter, where she routinely “bait[ed] celebrities with anti-gay messages” and celebrated such tragedies as the Fukushima nuclear disaster. She also started communicating with an anonymous lawyer who engaged her in intelligent and respectful theological debate. As she began questioning her religious beliefs, she realized that she was also falling in love with the lawyer, who eventually became her husband. Phelps-Roper soon found she could no longer support the cruelty and “all or nothing” nature of her faith. After Westboro leadership became even more conservative and hypocritical, she and a free-spirited younger sister made the excruciating decision to leave both the church and their family. Eloquent and entirely candid, the book offers an intimate look at a controversial church while telling the moving story of how one woman found the courage to stand against the people and beliefs that she held dearest.
A heartfelt and richly detailed memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27583-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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