A devastatingly triumphant story that will be a beacon for many women who suffer in silence.
A compelling, often disturbing account of one woman’s life in Christian fundamentalism.
After moving from Michigan to Florida, Levings’ mother thought joining a church might help the family acclimate to their new surroundings. The author, then a budding adolescent, was leery of the Baptist megachurch but eventually acquiesced. From there, the author progressed through youth group, summer camp, and a Christian school run by a Billy Graham–type figure. These influences provided a steady, unified stream of fundamentalist doctrine that led the author to blow past numerous red flags and marry her abusive boyfriend at age 19. Believing that his behavior was partly caused by her not being submissive enough, she tried to appease him by yielding more fully to his demands. Instead, it further fueled his tyrannical view of biblical patriarchy. When Levings failed to meet his expectations, he spanked her with a belt and mandated sex as a necessary part of the discipline process. “He wanted me to call him ‘my lord,’” she writes. “Wear only dresses. Cover my head with a scarf to show submission and modesty.” Meanwhile, she writes, he “turned to the men’s forums where husbands could get advice on how to make their wives cooperate.” Eventually, Levings discovered a virtual community of liberal-leaning, art-loving Christian women who, among others, provided a safety net when her marriage came to a cataclysmic head. The author pulls no punches in recounting nearly 15 years of oppression and abuse, painting a visceral portrait of her then-monochromatic world with bold strokes of linguistic color and sensory detail. This book stands out among other narratives about overcoming religious trauma in that it peels back the layers of Christian fundamentalism, exposing why it’s so attractive to people hungry for assurance and certainty.
A devastatingly triumphant story that will be a beacon for many women who suffer in silence.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250288288
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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