Julia Scheeres Blog

I read an advanced copy of Michelle Goldberg's "Kingdom Coming" (out in June from W.W. Norton), and heartily recommend it to any thinking American who'd like to prepare for the coming onslaught.

Goldberg's book tackles the rise of Christian fanaticism in the United States, from the surge in mega-churches to the creeping influence of fundamentalists in the nation's classrooms and courtrooms. Especially alarming is the concept of Dominionism - the idea that Christians are somehow ordained to rule nonbelievers (for their own good, of course) -- which she posits is threatening the bedrock of our Democracy. I personally know people who think God ordained George Bush to lead the free world.

Here's the book summary: "In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military retirees pledging to seize the nation in Christ's name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country's social problems."

Yikes.

My hometown paper, the SF Chron, finally reviewed "Jesus Land" today. It's a great review. Unfortunately, it's riddled with errors. As a book reviewer for the New York Times, I know it's crucial to triple-check your review before filing it. In fact, the Times is so anal, you have to jot down page numbers for every adjective, fact and quotation you pull from a book, so their squad of fact-checkers can comb through the manuscript and verify them. I once described a character as "balding" but forgot to reference the page number. When they couldn't find the adjective, I had to spend two hours re-scanning the entire book for the qualifier. Lesson learned.

Apparently, the Chron has no such fact-checking desk, at least not in their Book section.

The most egregious of the five errors is a statement that my brother David "accuses me of being a racist." This NEVER happened.

With those disclaimers, here is the review.

Happy Sunday, Julia

Here's a blog by a former student of Escuela Caribe that contains good descriptions of the everyday sadism practiced by the staff:

The Missing Years

Also, a group of alumni from the school built a website to let the public know about their experiences at New Horizons:

The Truth About New Horizons

Gotta love the Internet!

Anyone interested in the "teen help" industry should read Maia Szalavitz's brilliant expose of the business, "Help at Any Cost," to be published by Riverhead in March.

Although her book does not mention my alma mater, New Horizons, it does explore the history of teen behavoiral modification programs beginning in the 1970s with "The Seed" and "Straight." Many of these programs use the same techniques I witnessed in New Horizons, including deprivation, humiliation, and a rank system.

Here is the Publisher's Weekly summary of her book:

From Publishers Weekly
"This important book takes the troubled-teens industry to task, exposing the "extremely harsh, perhaps even brutal tactics [companies use to] keep [kids] in line." For $2,000 a month and more, a program will take an oppositional teen to a lockdown facility or a wilderness boot camp for however long it takes to break him or her. Parents pay more than an Ivy League tuition for their children to undergo some "out-of-line" punishments (use of "stress positions," brainwashing, etc.), and, says Szalavitz, there's no evidence that these facilities cure anything. Indeed, many teens suffer post-traumatic stress disorders for years; some actually die in these facilities. Szalavitz, a freelance journalist and senior fellow at Stats.org, has written a courageous—if horrifying—study of the tough-love industry, focusing on four key players: Straight Incorporated, North Star Expeditions, the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and the KIDS program. These hugely profitable businesses are largely unregulated by legal, medical or ethical codes, avoiding accountability for failure by blaming the victim. With a useful appendix discussing when and how to get responsible help for a troubled teen, this book, filled with first-person accounts, should be required reading in Parenting 101. (Feb.) "

I've been asked so many times about the James Frey disaster that I thought I'd blog about it so I can stop wasting precious brain time answering e-mails about this bozo.

In a nutshell: I think James Frey is an ass.

He lied for money, knowing the more he dramatized his story, the bigger advance he'd get. What he wrote was not memoir, it was standard fiction. All fiction writers base their plots on a blend of interest and experience (write what you know). Frey decided to label his fiction true in order to tap into the red hot memoir market. Unfortunately for all real memoirists, he's sullied the genre as readers grow suspicious of the lot of us.

Now I feel compelled to put my book into perspective. I wrote "Jesus Land" as a tribute to my brother David, and as a way to set the record straight by exposing the hypocrisy of the fundamentalists I grew up with. In my book's case, truth was greater than fiction. No need to embellish it or make up events - they stood on their own.

Perhaps it's my profession as a journalist that makes me so hypersensitive about notions of truth. We journalists know that if you lie, you loose your street cred. The whole point of journalism is to uncover the truth, not to invent it. It's a shame Frey duped so many readers by reinventing himself on paper as such a hero.

Anyway, I hope these will be the last words I ever formulate on the Frey affair. It sickens me, and that's the truth.