A compelling examination of a Christianist cabal whose crimes are evident but whose power seems, for the moment, unbreakable.
A fly-on-the-wall account of a religious cult and its discontents.
Headquartered in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the Word of Faith Fellowship has a long pedigree—and has long attracted the interest of law enforcement, write Associated Press reporters Weiss (The Heart of Hell: The Untold Story of Courage and Sacrifice in the Shadow of Iwo Jima, 2016, etc.) and Mohr. The founder, Jane Whaley, is “a godlike figure who professe[s] to have all the answers,” a woman quick to disappear with the collection plate—and who, the authors charge, was instrumental in the disappearance of an emerald so rare that the Brazilian government has been trying to retrieve it, the consequence of the church’s expansion not just into that country but also in other entrepôts around the world. The authors open with the daring escape, literally, of a church member and his wife, two refugees among 100 or so who have fled from the church and whose testimony provides the basis for this book—in addition to several law enforcement reports. Interestingly and ominously, some of those reports were never filed, and some were never even written thanks to the intercession of officials sympathetic to or supported by the WFF. Whaley, a charismatic leader surrounded by vulnerable followers and strong-arm lieutenants, has since sheltered herself in several ways, including forging political ties to the Trump administration and the Republican hierarchy in North Carolina. Meanwhile, amid such cultlike activities as dictating whom church members are allowed to marry, preaching a doctrine in which “sex is evil and demonic” and only the missionary position is acceptable, administering beatings to suspected apostates, and so forth, Whaley “has amassed millions.” Ominously, the authors note at the end, one church higher-up has lately acquired a license to transport cyanide, the potential recipe for another Jonestown.
A compelling examination of a Christianist cabal whose crimes are evident but whose power seems, for the moment, unbreakable.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-14523-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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