Volume 26, Number 16 · October 25, 1979
The Heavenly Deception
By Francine du Plessix Gray
Crazy for God: The Nightmare of Cult Life
by Christopher Edwards
Prentice-Hall, 233 pp., $8.95
Moonstruck: A Memoir of My Life in a Cult
by Allen Tate Wood, by Jack Vitek
William Morrow, 192 pp., $8.95
Hostage to Heaven: Four Years in the Unification Church, by an Ex-Moonie and the Mother Who Fought to Free Her
by Barbara Underwood, by Betty Underwood
Clarkson N. Potter, 320 pp., $10.95
Science, Sin, and Scholarship: The Politics of Reverend Moon and the Unification Church
edited by Irving Louis Horowitz
MIT Press, 290 pp., $12.50
He'd just graduated from Yale with straight A's in philosophy but his girl-friend left him for an Iraqi Marxist. His career at college was academically brilliant and emotionally arid. He was 'searching desperately for community.' Walking through the streets of Berkeley in the summer of 1975, Chris Edwards was approached by a young man his age who invited him to have dinner with 'the family' he lived with, 'a very loving, very idealistic group of young people.' He went to dinner. He was a little perplexed by his hosts' affectionate, constant smiling; but their passionate interest in him seemed like an oasis after 'the verbal jousts, the endless mocking and scorning' of his Ivy League life. He was touched by the affectionate way they piled brownies on his plate. They called themselves the Family. They had a country place in Boonville, ninety miles north of SanFrancisco.
Review, 5490 words
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