Leaving the Saints

January 17, 2005
Beck follows her bestselling spiritual memoir Expecting Adam
with this shocking accusation of sexual abuse and betrayal. The book is full of Beck's laugh-out-loud hyperbolic wit and exquisitely written insights, but it also has a hard, angry edge. She asserts that after returning to Utah in the early 1990s, she began to recall horrific memories of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father, well-known Mormon intellectual Hugh Nibley. Although all her immediate family members vehemently deny her claims (and one has already published the positive full-length biography Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life
), some readers will find that Beck builds a compelling case. She questions the legitimacy of Nibley's prolific apologetic writing and attributes his abuse in part to the pressures he was under to defend the faith even at the expense of truthful scholarship. Although marred by shallow, formulaic anti-Mormon criticisms and an exaggerated description of the LDS Church that will sound foreign to Mormons outside the insular culture of Utah, the book also describes how institutionalized religion can do terrible wrong to some adherents while still being a force of good for others. It will devastate faithful Mormons, satisfy disenchanted ex-Mormons and offer hope to those who believe they have suffered from ecclesiastical abuse.

November 15, 2004
Home from Harvard grad school after the birth of a Down syndrome son, Beck rebels against the authoritarian Mormon church and recalls past sexual abuse. With a six-city author tour; Beck writes for O Magazine.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2005
Beck is an extraordinarily good writer--not that she doesn't have a lot to work with in this compelling (and controversial) memoir. After the birth of a son with Down syndrome, Beck and her family left Harvard, where she and her husband were studying for degrees, to return to Utah and the comfort of a supportive Mormon community. As the daughter of one of the leading apologists for the Mormon faith, Beck was used to being blessed by strangers for her father's work. But back in Utah and teaching at Brigham Young, her rebellious scholarship gets her in trouble with church authorities. At the same time, her revelation that her father sexually abused her leads to religious, mental, and physical breakdowns. Told in alternating chapters that find Beck confronting her 90-year-old father in a hotel room and flashing back throughout her life, the book offers a powerful testament to the stranglehold that family and faith can put on people, even when both seem to harm rather than help. The highlight, however, is the way that Beck writes about her spirituality. Even in the face of her experiences with organized religion and with her father, she is able to express her newfound connection to God in a manner so pure that it can lift a willing reader to the place of all-encompassing love that she has found for herself. And one other thing: the book can be hilarious. In the midst of all this pain, sorrow, and deeply felt spirituality comes such humor that one can almost hear God laughing. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)