Nonfiction Book Reviews

Prophet’s Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside the Church Universal and Triumphant by Erin Prophet was the story of a cult that I had never heard of previous to picking this book up at the library.  I guess the Church Universal and Triumphant reached their heyday in 1990; I was just a child at that point, so I missed the whole thing entirely.

So here’s a brief synopsis for those who are likewise oblivious:

Elizabeth Clare Prophet (yes, her last name really was “Prophet” - she married a guy by the name of Mark Prophet) was the head of a New Age religion that incidentally, Mark Prophet started.  After his death, Elizabeth took over, and over time, the power quite simply went to her head.  She stopped talking as much about “decrees” and “energy” and moved on to prophesying that various catastrophes would hit the United States, everything from earthquakes to nuclear warheads.

Many religions have spent their time and energy in prophesying the end of the world - Elizabeth’s undoing came when she stated exactly when these catastrophes would happen, down to the very day they were to occur.

Her followers, sure that her words were divinely inspired, followed the call and moved with her to Montana, where they started building underground bunkers and storing up food to survive what had been prophesied to be a deployment of nuclear warheads, followed by a 7 year period of no ability to farm or grow food in any way.  Add in the destruction of all civilization (with only the righteous being spared, of course) and this was a true Armageddon scenario.

In an attempt to be one of the righteous (and prepared) ones to survive, the members of the church handed over their life savings and property to the church, quit their jobs, and moved to Montana to help build these bunkers.  Over a two-year period, the church spent roughly $20 million dollars in their quest to be ready for the end of the world, and caused environmental damage that took years to repair.

Well, the night came and went, and no nuclear bombs exploded.  Life continued on as it always did.  The cult survived, damaged, but still limping forward.

It sounds like an incredibly interesting book, right?  Except something about it just fell flat for me.  The book was labeled a “921″ in the Dewey Decimal system at the library, meaning that it was supposed to be either an autobiography or a biography, but it read more like a history of the Church Universal and Triumphant, with only a part of it being about Erin Prophet, the daughter.

Also, I think Erin was striving hard to be balanced and factual in her telling of the story, which I heartily applaud, but for some reason with this book, it only served to make the story removed from me, like I felt like I was reading everything through a thick glass wall.  I never felt like a part of the story, and I never really cheered on the protagonist or worried about what she was going to do next.

This distance is surprising - Erin certainly had a lot to be upset about.  Elizabeth ran her life with an iron fist.  She told Erin who to marry (worse yet, she told the husband-to-be when to propose and where to propose), she told Erin she couldn’t use birth control, and even went so far as to control when the newly married couple could have sex.  It was very disturbing.  The control that Elizabeth Prophet had over her daughter would be almost incomprehensible to the average American.  It seems like there would have been more anger on Erin’s part than she showed in the book.

So in the end, I have mixed feelings about the book.  I am glad to have learned more about cult culture, especially its history here in the US, but on the other hand, I think this is a book that I’ll easily forget about.  There are some books that stay with you long after you turn the last page (like Seabiscuit or Three Cups of Tea) but for me, this just won’t be one of them.

If you are intensely interested in cults in general, or the Church Universal and Triumphant in particular, than you’ll definitely want to check Prophet’s Daughter out.  I think you’ll find it fascinating.  But for the rest of us, I only give it a 3.75 out of 5 stars.

Hava

PS Just to see what others thought of the book, I went and checked out the reviews on Amazon and was surprised by what I found on there. Either people loved it or they hated it, and almost all of the reviews seemed to be done by people who are either current or ex-members of this cult. The ex-members all seemed to love the book - the current members (not surprisingly) all seemed to hate it. So I’d take anything you read on there with a grain of salt.

For any readers of young adult paranormal books, Lois Duncan is probably a very familiar name.  She produced such hits as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hotel for Dogs (another book that is being produced into a movie - this one is coming out in January of 2009.)

I don’t happen to be one of those people - I had heard the name Lois Duncan before and vaguely recognized it, but as far as I can remember, I haven’t read one of her books before.  I saw the book, Who Killed My Daughter? by Lois Duncan while doing check-in on Friday, and was instantly intrigued.  I don’t read true-life murder mysteries by writers like Ann Rule, but I figured that since this was a true-life murder mystery written by the mother of the victim, it would make it more interesting to me.

So I came home with it, and figured that since I was so tired, I would take it into the bedroom with me and read it until I fell asleep for my afternoon nap.  Two hours later, I was wide awake, and thoroughly engrossed in the story.  Unlike most true-life murder mysteries you can find on the bookshelf, I knew that this one ended on a question mark.  Here’s a quotation from the book flap:

Our teenage daughter Kaitlyn was chased down and shot to death while driving home from a girlfriend’s house on a peaceful Sunday evening.  Police dubbed the shooting “random.”  But to our family, the circumstances didn’t add up to “random,” especially after we made the shocking discovery that Kait had been keeping some very dangerous secrets from us…

After spending two years investigating Kait’s death, our family has managed to accumulate enough information to form a fragmented picture of what may have happened to her, but the jigsaw puzzle still lacks the few key pieces that could nail the identity of her killers.  It is my hope that reading Kait’s story will motivate potential informants to supply us with those pieces.

The shooting happened July 16, 1989, and the book was published in 1992.  I read the book knowing that it was solved now - after all, this book was old, and there was no way that it could still be an unsolved mystery.

I was wrong.

I finished the book Friday night at 1:00 in the morning.  It had made me so paranoid and freaked out (not only was this some wild stuff, but it was true wild stuff, and there are some really bad people in this book!) that I went around closing all the blinds in the house, convinced that the Vietnamese mafia was outside of my house, watching me.  Nevermind that I’m in Idaho, and as far as I know, there is no Vietnamese mafia for hundreds of miles.  I was convinced they had it out for me.

I then jumped online, happy to finally be able to find out “whodunnit.”  I had made myself wait until I finished the book before I looked, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by knowing the ending before I got to it.  I was shocked and a little mad that there wasn’t an ending to be found.  Not mad at Lois and her family, but mad the police force for not figuring it out. It’s almost 20 years later, and still no arrested killer? It seemed impossible.

Which is how Lois and her family feel about it too, I’m sure.  Six months after the shooting, on New Year’s Day of 1990, Lois’s husband said, “I thought they would have arrested the murderer by now.”  Little did he know he’d be saying that 19 years later…

You wouldn’t believe everything included in this book: Vietnamese mafia, insurance scams, drug cartels, psychics, frighteningly real (and accurate!) dreams, and the most inept police force you’ll ever meet.  If you asked this police force to add 2 + 2, I have no doubts but that they’d come up with the number 7, and then defend that answer within an inch of their lives.

If you’ve heard of this case before, or if you’ve already read Who Killed My Daughter?, you’ll want to check out the family’s website, Who Killed Kait Arquette? and read through the different links on there.  There are quite a few updates on there, like the fact that part of the inept and stupid police force has been convicted of felonies, and have been exposed as “rogue” cops.  That really doesn’t surprise you after reading the book.

There is also a cool section where you can read and post comments, and Lois Duncan will respond to those comments personally.  I put a comment up on Friday night/Saturday morning, and Lois had already responded to my comment by Sunday afternoon.  She is very on top of that board and responds quickly to each and every comment.

But the coolest part was the excerpts section - apparently, Lois Duncan is writing a sequel called, The Tallykeeper and might publish it also without an answer of “whodunnit.”  If she does, you can be sure that I’ll read it quickly and write up a review for it on here.  The excerpts alone made me breathless and sent my heart racing.

My only real problem with Who Killed My Daughter? was the psychics readings.   I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to that kind of thing, but then again, so has Lois Duncan.  She was sort of dragged into it at first, but by the end, she had become very reliant on what they said.

I didn’t mind that so much (I don’t have to believe something or be thoroughly convinced about its validity in order to enjoy a book) but instead my problem lay in the readings themselves.  Here’s an excerpt from one of the psychic readings:

 There will be this that will show that she will have had some kind of connection to these two suspects and that they know her.  There is something about them which will cause her to recoil as if there will have been some kind of other encounter at another time.  They will seem to have some way to fear that something is known about them by her and thus now by others.  This will seem to put a fear into them they will still be under the containment and control of the questioners and can be asked questions even if there is not fully know the meaning of the questions even by the questioners.

Come again?

Some passages make more sense, and some make less sense.  I found myself skimming the psychic readings after a while, because the stuff like above doesn’t make sense to me.   Perhaps I’m a little slow, I don’t know, but it seems rather convoluted to me.

Other than that, it was one of the most gripping books I have read in a very, very long time.  I simply could not put it down.  I think anyone who has even the slightest interest in true-life murder mysteries should pick this book up.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Lois - I hope you find the killer soon.

Havs

I picked up How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of the Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gates Gill on a whim. What an interesting idea - a story of riches to rags, the antithesis of your “normal” Hollywood plot.

In a nutshell, Michael Gates Gill (whose mother used to call him “Gatesy” as a boy - no wonder he was messed up!) was raised in a very rich family. Nannies, huge mansions, Yale education, lots of celebrities over the house…the whole shebang. He was hired right out of college at an advertising agency, and he spent 25 years there, giving them literally the best years of his life.

They fired him for being too old, at age 53 - they wanted a young group of hard-charging associates who would give the impression of being “cutting edge.” With sparse white hair, he was not the man for the job any longer.

He spent several years trying to run a consulting business but it never really took off. In the meanwhile, his wife divorced him because he was stupid enough to a) Have a mistress and b) Get her pregnant.  Here the book began: He was broke, without family support or friends, and had no job.

Enter Starbucks.

He got a job at Starbucks more or less on a whim. He’s lucky he even got it. During the interview, the interviewer asked if he had ever worked retail. He gave her a blank stare. She clarified, “You know, like Wal-Mart?” Turns out, he had never even been inside of a Wal-Mart, let alone worked at one.

From that less-than-auspicious beginning grew a dedication between Mike (as he called himself at Starbucks) and the Starbucks chain. He sings their praises throughout the book - the health benefits offered, the great work atmosphere, the money Starbucks offers their employees to get a college education. It almost made me want to work at a Starbucks myself, except I’ve already found my perfect job.

There were a few things that bothered me (you knew it was coming!) Mr. Gill spends quite a bit of time reminiscing on his past life, and tells stories about famous people he met.

It got to the point where I felt like all he was doing was name-dropping (look at me, I’m special, I’ve met Jackie Kennedy and Frank Sinatra and Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali and Robert Frost and…the list goes on.) I’m not a big fan of people who name drop, so to me this got to be annoying.

He also talks about how he made the change from being an autocratic snob to now believing in affirmative action, the implication being that if you don’t agree with affirmative action, you are an autocratic snob. I didn’t think that the inclusion of a political subject like that was of much help to the story line, nor did I appreciate the implication that I was an autocratic snob, since I don’t think reverse discrimination is any better than the original discrimination. How is discriminating against a second group of people better than discriminating against the first group of people?

He also had a rather stilted manner of writing that made it obvious this was the first book he wrote, and that no ghost writer helped him out along the way.  He wasn’t horrible, he just wasn’t that great either.

But all of that aside, it was an okay autobiography, and it did make me think about the question of how much of our happiness is our circumstances, and how much of it is our attitude. For Mr. Gill, he was happier working at Starbucks and living in a cruddy apartment than he had ever been living in a huge mansion but slaving away at his job. It’s a great book to help you rethink your priorities.

In the end, How Starbucks Saved My Life garners 3.75 out of 5 stars. If you’re a Starbucks lover, then I’d rate this as a must read.

Hava

The Secret Revealed: Exposing the Truth About the Law of Attraction by James L. Garlow and Rick Marschall was a book that definitely didn’t impress me. I had originally heard about The Secret from a friend of mine who really believed it with every fiber of his soul.  I sat down and watched the movie with him to humor him, and although at the time I thought, “Wow, that looked really interesting - could that really be true?” afterwards I started to really think about it.

After discussing it with my sister, we eventually came to the conclusion that The Secret comes apart at the seams for the same reason that karma does: How do you account for when bad things happen to good people, when according to karma (and The Secret), everything that happened to you is your fault?  Can you honestly say that a little girl who was raped repeatedly, hacked to pieces, and then fed to the dogs was somehow responsible for that happening because she didn’t make her bed that morning?  Truly, how could any little girl, or any human being at all, be horrid enough to deserve a fate like that?

So I decided that karma, and The Secret, couldn’t be true.  I went on my merry way, until I saw this book.  I thought, “Wow, how cool!  A book that debunks The Secret!”  I knew that the whole “everything that’s happened to you in your whole life is because of your own thoughts and actions, so suck it up” was wrong, but what else was I missing? I was sure there were other glaring inconsistencies in the movie/book that I had overlooked.

As I started reading though, I realized quickly that the whole “expose” could be summed in one sentence: We are Christians; The Secret is New Age stuff; we don’t believe in New Age stuff; Christ is so much better and makes you so much happier.  Okay, so it’s a run-on sentence, but you get the picture. I had expected something in-depth, something helpful, but instead got several hundred pages of the above, just regurgitated in different forms.  They did touch on the whole karma idea, for roughly 2 paragraphs (I counted).  That was the only time it was brought up in the entire book.  The rest of the time, all of the arguments seemed to base on the fact that there was no way The Secret could be correct, because it was based on New Age philosophy, and that’s of the devil.

How could that be even remotely helpful?  I think it really didn’t help things that I didn’t know from the beginning that this was a “Christian” book.  After an hour of skimming through and becoming more disgusted by the moment, I flipped the book over and checked the labeling section, to see where the publisher suggested that the book be filed at in the bookstore.  It was then that I saw the Christianity label.  I had not realized that going in, and I think that if I had, perhaps my reference point and what I was expecting out of the book would have been different.

I was expecting an unbiased review of The Secret, much like the Debunking 9/11 Myths by Popular Mechanics was an unbiased review of what happened on that tragic day.  Debunking 9/11 Myths wasn’t written from a Christian point of view, with references and debates hinging upon that.  Instead, it referenced studies, reports, and interviews, and based what it said on facts.  None of that was to be found in The Secret Revealed.

I give this book 1.25 stars out of 5.  Don’t waste your time reading it - I summed up pretty much everything it said in the above four paragraphs anyway.