Kevin Roose
While I generally despise the memoir as a literary form, I was immediately intrigued when I read about this project on a blog that I read. Kevin Roose, a fairly normative student at Brown, decided to spend a semester studying "abroad" at Jerry Falwell's playground, ultra-conservative Liberty University. While you expect the book to contain heavy doses of thick cynicism (and it does have its moments), it actually gives Liberty University quite a fair shake and is, if anything, a bit lenient. Roose is an exceptional writer for someone who is basically my age, and his voice is clear, distinct, and reasonable throughout. Roose tackles his subject admirably, using a well-proportioned mix of information, anecdote, and dialogue seasoned with properly placed humor and seriousness to create an enjoyable and easily readable account of his time in a foreign land. What is most striking about Roose's prose is how easily and immediately any college student can relate to his experiences, especially students from a similar intellectual background. I suppose some of my ease with the prose is due to my familiarity with a collegiate lifestyle, but Roose does an excellent job describing the first-day jitters and their amplification given his need to concoct some careful lies about his past and motivations.
His stories throughout are well-chosen and, though they feel a bit repetitive towards the end of the book, each serves to illuminate another (often unexpected) facet of life at one of the country's most strongly evangelical outposts. Though these stories are always revealing, often in the most charitable of ways, the fact that each one so strongly serves a central purpose takes away from the central narrative a bit and makes the book seem like a series of points; Roose's occasional use of bullets makes The Unlikely Disciple seem at times too academic for its lighthearted, narrative-based tone and incident-based structure. There are also interactions that come off as incredibly awkward, and while Roose calls attention to the fact that he may have asked too many awkward questions to quite fit in at Liberty, this attention merely frames much of the dialogue to make it seem less genuine than I'm sure it actually was. A point where Roose excells, though, is when he's on his own trying to sift out his actual thoughts and beliefs from the religious overload he experiences constantly. The Unlikely Disciple brings disciplined, fair thought processes to a lot of controversial events and ideas and though, as a gay person, it hurts when Roose begins ignoring the gay slurs that occur daily around him, the fact that he himself is the first to call himself out is reassuring and helps provide a more complete perspective on his experience. Roose seems genuine and earnest, two particularly necessary qualities for this monumental task of investigative journalism, and while he does a lot of moralizing he never seems heavy-handed.
Kevin Roose is an incredibly even-handed thinker and he provides one of the best reasoned and written books about the often inflammatory topic of extreme evangelism in American life, which he appears to approach with an open mind and a willingness to experience the Liberty way of life as genuinely as possible without sacrificing his own closely held ideals and beliefs. It's particularly honest of him to admit that, though his views of evangelicals have shifted radically in some respects (they are certainly not as cookie-cutter and brainless as we madcap liberals would like to think), his political viewpoints have stood pat. He allows himself to become immersed in the experience but retains an honestly open mind in a world where conformity is required on all sides. While this book won't singlehandedly bridge the rift between conservative evangelicals and their despised liberal enemies, The Unlikely Disciple is an intriguing look into a world that is perhaps more foreign to the typical Ivy League student than the secular worlds of Western Europe. Those curious about the other side of the aisle, no matter which side they come from, should enjoy this book, provided they approach Roose's study with as open a mind as he admirably does.
Grade: A
His stories throughout are well-chosen and, though they feel a bit repetitive towards the end of the book, each serves to illuminate another (often unexpected) facet of life at one of the country's most strongly evangelical outposts. Though these stories are always revealing, often in the most charitable of ways, the fact that each one so strongly serves a central purpose takes away from the central narrative a bit and makes the book seem like a series of points; Roose's occasional use of bullets makes The Unlikely Disciple seem at times too academic for its lighthearted, narrative-based tone and incident-based structure. There are also interactions that come off as incredibly awkward, and while Roose calls attention to the fact that he may have asked too many awkward questions to quite fit in at Liberty, this attention merely frames much of the dialogue to make it seem less genuine than I'm sure it actually was. A point where Roose excells, though, is when he's on his own trying to sift out his actual thoughts and beliefs from the religious overload he experiences constantly. The Unlikely Disciple brings disciplined, fair thought processes to a lot of controversial events and ideas and though, as a gay person, it hurts when Roose begins ignoring the gay slurs that occur daily around him, the fact that he himself is the first to call himself out is reassuring and helps provide a more complete perspective on his experience. Roose seems genuine and earnest, two particularly necessary qualities for this monumental task of investigative journalism, and while he does a lot of moralizing he never seems heavy-handed.
Kevin Roose is an incredibly even-handed thinker and he provides one of the best reasoned and written books about the often inflammatory topic of extreme evangelism in American life, which he appears to approach with an open mind and a willingness to experience the Liberty way of life as genuinely as possible without sacrificing his own closely held ideals and beliefs. It's particularly honest of him to admit that, though his views of evangelicals have shifted radically in some respects (they are certainly not as cookie-cutter and brainless as we madcap liberals would like to think), his political viewpoints have stood pat. He allows himself to become immersed in the experience but retains an honestly open mind in a world where conformity is required on all sides. While this book won't singlehandedly bridge the rift between conservative evangelicals and their despised liberal enemies, The Unlikely Disciple is an intriguing look into a world that is perhaps more foreign to the typical Ivy League student than the secular worlds of Western Europe. Those curious about the other side of the aisle, no matter which side they come from, should enjoy this book, provided they approach Roose's study with as open a mind as he admirably does.
Grade: A
1 comment:
I sense a theme to your last few books.
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